Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel
Summary
Thomas Cromwell is a blacksmith's son from Putney who has been a soldier, a merchant and a lawyer, and who arrives at the centre of English power because he is the only man in the room who can actually get things done. The novel covers roughly 1500 to 1535: the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, Henry's determination to be rid of Katherine of Aragon, the break with Rome, and the execution of Thomas More.
Mantel's decision, and it is the whole book, is to write it in the present tense from inside Cromwell's head. Everything is happening now, seen by a man of extraordinary competence and long memory, and More becomes the antagonist rather than the saint of the standard account.
The famous difficulty is the pronoun. Mantel writes "he" for Cromwell so consistently that in crowded scenes you can lose the thread. She adjusted this in later books, and the trick is simple: when "he" is ambiguous, it is Cromwell.
Give it fifty pages to acclimatise and it becomes one of the most immersive historical novels ever written. It is long, dense with names, and worth every page. The dialogue in particular is extraordinary: dry, quick and modern without ever sounding anachronistic.
A note for the hesitant: you do not need to know Tudor history. Mantel explains nothing and assumes nothing, and the confusion of a reader meeting fifty courtiers is roughly the confusion of a man from Putney arriving at court. That alignment is deliberate. Keep a family tree to hand if it helps, though most readers find they stop needing one by page one hundred.
Historical Context & Significance
Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize in 2009, the first of Hilary Mantel's two, and it beat a shortlist that included two previous laureates in A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee. James Naughtie chaired the judges alongside Lucasta Miller, John Mullan, Sue Perkins and Michael Prodger.
Mantel was fifty seven and had been publishing well reviewed and modestly selling novels for nearly twenty five years. Wolf Hall changed that completely, selling in the millions and making her the most prominent British novelist of her generation.
Its effect on Thomas Cromwell's reputation was remarkable. For centuries Cromwell had been fixed as a calculating villain, most famously in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, and Mantel's version, humane and self made and grieving, became the default. Adaptations for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the BBC followed.