Comments on Wolf Hall–Hilary Mantel

[majkia]

I’ve decided to write an actual review. A zillion have already been done. Instead a few comments regarding the book.

Firstly, it was certainly a different take on things, to look at Henry VIII from, of all people’s viewpoints, Thomas Cromwell’s. I knew little about him as an individual before I began the book, so not sure how close to what we really know Mantel stayed. But the character she created was certainly interesting, with depth and intelligence. He certainly changed throughout the book, growing to fit his increasing stature and importance.

Second, why the heck did she call it ‘Wolf Hall’?  Yeah, I get that the Howards etc were really important, but still…

Thirdly, I found the writing style very off-putting at first. I had lots of trouble with dangling ‘he’s and was confused a lot as to who was speaking, who was acting. I had to go back and re-read to figure it out.  I also didn’t much care for use of present tense. I dislike it in most books, but combined with the ‘he’ problem, it made reading the book more difficult and pulled me out of the atmosphere all too much.

I expect I’ll read the follow on ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ at some point or other. Because the story is interesting from this different viewpoint.

Comments

[sollers]

I got the book out of the library (fortunately; I'm glad I didn't buy it) and returned it when I'd only read a couple of chapters. I had had high hopes of it but I found the style terminally off-putting.

I didn't care for the use of the present tense either. There can be good justifications for it; it's totally appropriate in "The Hunger Games" because you don't know initially that she will have a future for her present to be the past in (a bit convoluted there but I hope you see what I mean) but in this case there seems to be no reason. If the idea is to give a sense of immediacy, it doesn't work, not for me anyway. What with that and the confusing pronouns, about which I also agree, it was taking more effort to read than I was prepared to put into it.

Instead I got out a totally fascinating book on the cipher-breaking machine "Colossus" which was both bung full of mathematics and rivetingly readable.