Title:
Wolf Hall
Author: Hilary Mantel
ISBN: 987 0 00 729241 7
Published: Fourth Estate, HarperCollins
Date: 2009
And
Title: Bring Up The Bodies
Author: Hilary Mantel
ISBN 978 0 8050 9003 1 52800
Originally Published by: Fourth Estate,
2012
Book
quote (from Bring Up The Bodies):
‘If you intend
to kill me in public, and mount a show, be quick. Or I may die of grief alone
in this room.’
He shakes his
head. ‘You’ll live.’ He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief:
for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal.
But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing,
but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must
thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your
heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
I had read Wolf Hall a number of years previously, and on reading the second
in the series, Bring Up The Bodies,
wished to refresh my memory. So I looked in my book blog. Where was Wolf Hall?
Not there. Hmm. Odd.
I checked the back-up files. Ah, there’s a
file, not in the ‘posted reviews’ folder but out in the cold. Five pages of
increasingly incoherent notes, exclamations and jotted observations. And then I
remembered. Wolf Hall was so complex,
so daunting, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to utter an opinion or post a
review.
So here’s the start of that review, on Wolf
Hall. A few years later.
This novel flouts – no, openly beats and
throws out of doors with curses – so many of the rules that as writers we’re told
to stick by it almost makes me seasick with the turmoil. In the scheme of
things, the reader is at the very bottom of order of importance. There is
absolutely no pandering to the needs of anyone so inconsequential.
Follow the current trend of segmenting
reading chunks into small portions, so the book can be put down conveniently?
You must be joking, you’ll have hold onto the tome for all you’re worth and be
grateful if it’s not bucking you off physically. Shorten sentences? (What?)
Clarify your pronouns? Indeed, specify your pronouns? (That’s for wimps.) Quite
often, there’s simply no indication at all of who ‘he’ is – you’ll just have to
read on, guess (or give up), and perhaps at the next reading you’ll know. (Work
for it, dammit.) Any concessions to a lack of intimate knowledge of Tudor life?
(Get off my book if you don’t know what’s going on, it’s not for you.) Well,
how about timeline and tense, is it clear who we’re talking about and what
period of their life it is? Of course not. Well, not immediately, you have to
read on, in faith, and then think about the bits that went last, piece it
together to realise that although you had
just been reading a piece of writing in the past tense on 1527 events, you’re
now reading a body of narrative in the present tense about earlier events,
which itself contains another chunk in the past tense that probably refers to
about 1492 or so, even though the chapter heading states it’s 1521-1529. I even
found a few typos. It’s absolutely merciless. The reader is tossed into the
brine with not the slightest regard as to whether they will sink or swim. If
they sink - well, tough. They should have learned to swim ere they were tossed.
Carrying this mountain of novel-writing
faux-pas, it won the 2009 Booker Prize.
Deserved? You bet. In fact, for me, it’s
one of the most encouraging prize-awards I’ve seen in a long time. Why? Several
reasons.
The trend is, long novels don’t win the
booker. (Why that is so one scarcely dares to speculate… it couldn’t possibly
be that the judges can’t be bothered, could it?) This is certainly in keeping
with the influence that the internet has had on literature: tearing prose into
smaller and smaller chunks, leaning towards sound-bites, word-bites and all
sorts of informational snacking. Flash
fiction didn’t even exist when I last looked – now it’s everywhere. Wolf Hall weighs in at 650 pages and
every word is a gem – that in itself is an achievement but the fact that it’s
been acknowledged as such is truly surprising. And heartening. (I for one
appreciate a decent meal, not a snack).
In general, you have to take your reader by
the hand, and cosset them. Consider who you’re writing for. Usually one would
try to make whatever section of society this is as broad as decently possible.
Who is the target audience for Wolf Hall? Specialists in Tudor history with a
background in politics, psychology and social development, it seems, and ones
who have plenty of time on their hands at that. And yet it’s a bestseller.
Now I have to admit, I can’t quite
understand this. I really don’t see how such a proportion of people can read
and understand this book. There are numerous passages where there’s simply no
way of knowing what is going on or who is doing what unless you know very
intimate details of the period. Like, which Bishop was in residence at what
house during which years. Who worked for whom. Most of it is Goggle-able (and I
had to resort to this frequently during the course of reading) but I wonder
whether the average reader would bother to do this. Now, if I were the author,
I would be perfectly pleased that people are at least buying the book, but I
would have a sneaking suspicion that perhaps it’s being left unread on the
shelf, or skimmed through, in quite a few instances.
This very same ‘drawback’ to the book is of
course also its greatest forte and innovation. It utilises the technique of
creating imaginative room within the text in the sphere of historical
knowledge. The best pieces of writing are where the reader is left to fill in
the blanks, to join in the creative process, participate in determining the
story and its implications. Hamlet’s
mysterious lure, for example, is largely down to the ambiguities within it: it
could be called a play about gaps in silences in many ways. Many writers give
the reader ‘breathing space’ in this way, to draw various possible implications
from ambiguous writing. I’ve never before seen assumed historical knowledge
used like this before. It gives the novel an almost four-dimensional quality. The
narrative (1st dimension) dialogue between reader and novelist (2nd),
pre-emptive knowledge the reader possesses historically (3rd) and
implications of how history is created questions into the nature or perceived
reality (4th).
Which leads to the often-discussed issue of
the makeover Mantel has given to Thomas Cromwell in this book. I’m nearly a
thousand words into the review and haven’t given a synopsis yet, and should
leave it that way to be in keeping with the style of the book. But here we are.
Synopsis: Following the life of Thomas Cromwell (Henry VIII’th eventual
Chancellor of the Exchequer) up till the execution of his contemporary, Thomas
More, in 1535. Well that was easy, wasn’t it?
That’s as far as I wrote… coherently. There
followed here various excepts from the book, illustrating portrayal of the rise
of meritocracy, the validity of the dissolution of the monasteries, the role of
food as a binding agent to relationships and its visceral nature in becoming part
of the body, the differences between reality and concealment, and concealment
of reality even if there is nothing to conceal, the giddying uncertainties of
an age of unthinkable change of thought, mercantilism, and other topics. I was
evidently overwhelmed.
Bring
Up The Bodies is not quite so abstruse. The same concerns
pervade the novel. The time is a little later on, up to the execution of Anne
Boleyn. I didn’t realize until nearly the end (where it crops up) that the
title refers to habeas corpus, the legal term. Suddenly it is a most fitting
title.
The obsession with bodies is everywhere. It
sticks to you like a sludge as you go through the book. Bodies that are active,
ingesting, failing, dissolving, pervading everywhere. The body of the King,
that metonym for the country, is literally the central theme of the work, along
with the other bodies that central one interacts with. Henry isn’t described so
much in terms of a character, but a force. He is a central verb, verbing away
at all the other greater and lesser embodied verbs that surround him and form
the body politic, and the body of the land. Within this central dynamic fit all
the other concerns. Loyalty, treachery, truth, innocence, skill, fear, sex,
appetite, will and power.
The tenses and the POV have calmed down.
You don’t feel as if you’re about to be thrown off at any moment. The narrative
is condensed, the timeline is short, the focus intense. Without doubt, an
easier read. The language continues an embarrassment of riches.
And now I hear that the third in the
trilogy (I didn’t know it was going to be a trilogy) is due out in March 2020.
Guess where I’ll be heading!
Five out of five moose hoofs up for both,
but don’t blame me if you need to take a Travelcalm along the way. All worthwhile.
