Hilary Mantel's novel, Wolf Hall, will be ....
a hard read for some, but it is worth the effort. Wolf Hall is set in England during the reign of Henry VIII. We have been inundated with the Tudors on tv with the series The Tudors and the Masterpiece Theatre production, The Six Wives of Henry VIII. But these are fluff compared with Mantel's 600-page or thereabout novel. She has written it in a docu-drama style as are some of the History Channel specials. She (Mantel) gives you a date and a place, then with very little descriptive narrative, she starts right in with dialog between the characters. To my knowledge, there are no fictional characters and no love interest(s) ala Hollywood. The book starts with the near fatal beating of Thomas Cromwell by his father, Walter, a blacksmith. And it doesn't slow down for the rest of the book. The story is told with Thomas Cromwell as the protaginist, an uncle many times removed of the Oliver Cromwell who was head of the short-lived republic after the execution of Charles I. Oliver was directly descended from Thomas Cromwell's sister.
Thomas Cromwell was the right hand of Cardinal Wolsey, and after Wolsey's death, he became the first minister of Henry VIII until he fell out of favor and was executed, as was Thomas More before him, the author of Utopia.
If you know your history of England in the 16th century, you wont get lost. But if you are as I am, a little unfamiliar with some of the minor players in the kingship of Henry VIII, you'll be running to look up some characters or events on Wikipedia. This book has more characters than War and Peace, or so it seems. But Ms Mantel's novel, the 1909 Man Booker winner, is a bright beacon in the dearth of quality fiction in this new 21st century. If you stick with it, you'll find this novel is worth the effort. Henry VIII just thought he was getting a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, but by separating the papacy of Rome from England (largely with Thomas Cromwell's help) the world was changed.
The title Wolf Hall is the name of the home of Jane Seymour, Henry's third wife whom he married after Anne Boleyn. Because Thomas Cromwell is still working to get Henry married and propagate a heir to the throne at novel's end, I strongly suspect Ms Mantel is working on a sequel.
