FICTION: Wolf Hall: A novelBy Hilary Mantel 4th Estate, 653pp. £18.99
ON THE 500th anniversary of his ascent to the throne, the reign of Henry VIII still rivets us. The king was an enormous character and the overflow of his turbulent domestic life into political and religious reform ruptured the history of these islands, marking England’s break from its ancient obeisance to Rome and the beginnings of modernity. Hilary Mantel’s latest work deals with a comparatively brief period of that reign, from 1527 to Sir Thomas More’s execution in 1535. Yet the sheer bulk of this blockbuster is almost as overwhelming as its subject, recording the shifting tensions of a court at war with itself and detailing the constant negotiations of people and politics through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from blacksmith’s son to sophisticated businessman and right- hand fixer for the King.
The bones of the story are familiar enough. After a spine-chilling chapter about Cromwell’s brutalised childhood, the drama leaps 27 years to the point where Henry’s failure to deliver a male heir is undermining his reign and loosening control of England’s territories abroad. Katherine of Aragon, his deeply religious wife, has produced their daughter, Mary, and refuses an annulment. Cardinal Wolsey, with his upwardly mobile agent, Thomas Cromwell, is brokering negotiations with Rome, only too aware of Henry’s increasing impatience to marry Anne Boleyn and of his attraction to a more liberal form of Christianity coming whispered across the sea from Germany and the Low Countries.
Yet for all its meticulous history, this is no standard historical novel. As always, Mantel has tried something different, bringing us right inside the action and forcing us to read both sides of every argument. Despite the benefit of hindsight, she manages to free her characters from any predictable line-up of goodies and baddies. Everything is described in the present tense, played out like meandering film scripts, with Cromwell, as part director, part cameraman, always straining to keep one step ahead in Henry’s dangerously fickle world.
The parade of great events comes in obliquely, through glimpses and gossip.
In such constant shifting of people and great houses, arranged marriages and sudden deaths, non-historians may sometimes struggle to keep up. For them, the author has provided family trees to explain the Tudor and York claimants to the throne. In addition, her five-page “Cast of Characters” is reminiscent of a great Russian novel, a guide to the multiply-named individuals who walk in and out of the drama – servants, children, animals and city merchants or priests, heretics and nobles at Court.
Through it all, Thomas Cromwell remains a shadowy figure. His years in Europe, in which the runaway grew from boy soldier to cultured banker and lawyer, are vague, remembered like dreams as he recovers from the execution of Wolsey to gain his reputation as “the cleverest man in England”. Mantel’s portrait makes him somewhat kinder than his biography might suggest, but his antennae for condescension from the aristocrats in Henry’s Court are convincingly prickly – he is asked too often if he can shoe a horse by “men who are always talking about ancient pedigrees, and boyhood friendships, and things that happened when you were still trading wool on the Antwerp exchange”.
The King, too, remains somewhat two-dimensional. Perhaps we already know him too well, though conventional portrayal gives little hint of the high voice which “rises when he is angry into an ear-throbbing shriek” or how, despite his prodigious appetites, he “deprecates coarse language, and not a few courtiers have been frozen out for telling a dirty story”.
In fact, Mantel has reserved her best scenes for the women. Seen through Cromwell’s eyes, Princess Mary is a short-sighted “dwarf”. A childlike Jane Seymour waits her turn in Henry’s court, her eyes “the colour of water, where her thoughts slip past, like gilded fishes too small to hook or net”.
Anne Boleyn’s sexual allure is powerful, as is her ability to refuse the King until marriage: “using her body like a soldier . . . she divides it up and names every part, this my thigh, this my breast, this my tongue”. As for the newborn Princess Elizabeth, she is a “grizzling knot of womankind, with an upstanding ruff of pale hair and a habit of kicking up her gown as if to display her most unfortunate feature”.
THE NOVEL ENDSabruptly with the execution of Thomas More. Cromwell is to lose his head five years later. But the Tudor revolution will go on to re-create the kingdom of England – and Ireland, a territory which Cromwell "cannot turn his back on, for fear of who might come in". Reflecting on its warring chiefs, he adds: "on their land they own every beast and every man, and in times of scarcity they take the bread to feed their hunting dogs. No wonder they don't want to be English. It would interrupt their status as slave-owners". Here as everywhere, his judgement is distinctive, cynical and questionably reliable.
History is relayed as something half-heard and contradictory, but no less potent for that. This might sum up Mantel’s own ambitious enterprise, often achieved to memorable and poignant effect, but leaving echoing spaces in between.
Wolf Hall: A novelBy Hilary Mantel 4th Estate, 653pp. £18.99
Aisling Foster is a novelist