Wolf Hall

Recently on the excellent CBC Sunday morning radio program called The Sunday Edition, the host, Michael Enright, interviewed the interesting English writer Hilary Mantel. I have been one of Hilary Mantel's admirers for many years, during which she has written several fascinating novels, some with historical themes, others completely different. She also writes literary essays and reviews, some of which are published in the New York Review of Books, and are always worth reading. Last year she won the Man-Booker prize for a truly magnificent novel, Wolf Hall. This is primarily about the life of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from humble beginnings, son of a violent, drunken blacksmith, to become adviser first to Cardinal Wolsey, then to King Henry VIII, at the time he was shaking loose from his 20-year marriage to Katherine of Aragon and flirting with Anne Boleyn who apparently fended off his final assault on her virginity until she was safely married to him. As portrayed by Hilary Mantel, Anne is a flighty, flirtatious minx who becomes a vicious shrew after the birth of Elizabeth, but the book ends before she fell from grace and was beheaded after being found guilty of adultery. Like her predecessor Katherine who gave birth to Mary but no sons, Anne gave Henry VIII only a daughter, who would eventually become Queen Elizabeth after her half-sister's reign as Queen Mary, Bloody Mary, came to an end. The Tudors are characters in Wolf Hall, but the book is mainly about Thomas Cromwell. He is the central figure, who mixes and mingles with a large cast of characters, almost all real people known to us from detailed histories of the time. Thomas Cromwell is often portrayed, for instance in Robert Bolt's play, A Man for all Seasons, as an evil creature who extracted confessions from purported or putative enemies of Henry VIII by unspeakable forms of torture. Among his victims were Thomas More, the 'man for all seasons' (and several alleged lovers of Anne Boleyn, although that happened later, after this book ends with Thomas Cromwell's first visit to Wolf Hall). Thomas More is usually portrayed as a heroic and noble man who did great good in his time and was destroyed and ultimately executed only because he could not bring himself to accept Henry VIII's divorce from Katherine and marriage to Anne. Here he is a flawed man whose destruction was largely Anne Boleyn's doing, aggravated by his own obstinacy. Cromwell is not a perfect human being in Hilary Mantel's novel but he is presented sympathetically, as a basically decent man who rose to eminence solely because of his own talent, administrative ability and political savvy. In her recent interview with Michael Enright, Hilary Mantel talked about the second book on Thomas Cromwell that she has been writing as a continuation of this one (what good news it was to hear that there is to be a sequel, or a second volume of this long, impressive novel!). That will deal with the intrigues that brought about the destruction of Anne Boleyn, the consequences of Cromwell's acquaintance with the Seymour family, which provided another bride for Henry VIII, and Cromwell's own fall and execution. If that second volume is as rich in well rounded characters and as unputdownable as this first one, it will be worth waiting for. I hope the wait won't be too long. I'm not sure how many more years I will be around to read books like this but awaiting that sequel will be one incentive to stay around for a while longer than I might otherwise wish.