Wolf Hall by: Hilary Mantel
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Rating: 
408 reviews
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Release date: 30th April, 2009
Media: Hardcover
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# Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd (30 April 2009) # Language English # ISBN-10: 0007230184 # ISBN-13: 978-0007230181
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Average rating - (more reviews)
Rating: 
- Superb
The characters are wonderfully immediate and real. Cannot wait to see the moral and emotional place this Cromwell character takes us to in the subsequent books.
Rating: 
- Stick with it for fascinating read if you enjoy this period
I read the first chapter twice as like some others, I didn't always find it easy to understand to whom 'he' referred in dialogue patches - at first I thought the book was going to be a slog, but once over the initial confusion, I loved it. Best read I've had this year and felt it made the Tudor world come alive. Possibly, the last 50 pages or so seemed to lose a bit of momentum for me, but I'm still keenly anticipating the sequel. I would have given it 5 stars without the 'he' issue.
Rating: 
- Pointless rubbish
I read all 650 pages of this book so as to be able to make a fair judgement. All this dialogue is supposedly between real people who lived in Tudor England. Not one word was ever uttered by those people. To those who say it showed them what Tudor England was like, try reading some history. It told us nothing about the characters. It is only Hilary Mantel's imaginary musings. The book is utterly pointless and totally unconvincing. I will run a million miles before wasting any more of my life reading any equally pointless sequel.
Rating: - One of the best books I've read
I bought this as a 'duty' (must read Booker Prize novel) and started with some apprehension. I thought it would be worthy but dull and historically intricate given my patchy knowledge of the time. I'd also read Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black which, admirably written though it is, I couldn't warm to. However this novel is amazing: very easy to read and the characters are brilliantly drawn so that you really care / dislike them as appropriate. I haven't finished yet but am really loath for it to end.
Some people have said it's difficult to read as Ms Mantel never writes 'Cromwell said...' but always 'he said...' which, when there are other male characters talking can be a bit confusing. However it's not that bad - most of the dialogue is so subtle and cunning that re-reading it is no hardship and as a way to keep to reduce distance to Cromwell's thoughts, I found it effective overall.
Highly recommended.
Now want to get my hands on Jonathan Franzen's new one as The Corrections was one of the other best books I've read...
Rating: 
- Decently written, but overlong and focussed on over exposed period of history
A very surprising winner of the Booker Prize, Wolf Hall is a historical novel of epic length. It charts the rise to power of Thomas Cromwell, a powerful courtier in the time of Henry VIII. It's not the type of novel that usually wins the Booker - not especially 'literary', fairly conventional in its subject matter and style. That's not to say it's unworthy or badly written - it isn't - but it doesn't fit the usual profile of novels that win this accolade.
For me, I'm a little baffled by a lot of the extravagent praise heaped on by reviewers. People describe it as 'dazzling' or 'brilliant' - neither are terms I would apply to even parts of this novel. My preferred terms would be 'decent' and 'adequate'. It's a good enough read, not badly written, mildly interesting, occasional humourous scenes or particularly nicely phrased paragraphs jumping out at you. But there's nothing remotely 'dazzling' about it.
It feels as though the whole Catherine of Aragon/Anne Boleyn story has been covered a great deal in recent years, with Philippa Gregory's 'Other Boleyn Girl' and the BBC serial 'The Tudors'. I did find it rather boring to read through it all again knowing exactly what would happen, especially as this is a very detailed and lengthy rehashing of this famous spell in history. Whilst the character of Cromwell brings a fresh perspective, it's not enough to get rid of the staleness around this over familiar subject.
I do feel that the novel is overly long and occasionally descends into real tedium - I did skip and skim passages. The character of Cromwell is well constructed and portrayed - I found him both fascinating and sympathetic, and I did actually care about his fate, which kept me going through the endless descriptions of the legal wrangling around Henry's first divorce - the outcome of which we all know only too well. The dialogue is generally well written but poorly attributed, so it is often hard to tell who is saying what - something that is both annoying and confusing, and really unnecessary in a book of this pedigree. There are a plethora of characters, often with similar names, or several names each, and complex inter-relationships with the other characters. Despite the 'dramatis personae' and family tree at the start of the book, it's not easy to keep track.
As mentioned above, the plot is going to harbour no surprises for anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of British history. The pacing is on the slow side, yet the ending is very abrupt and the whole thing feels truncated. Even though we are told a sequel is on its way, this book could have been tied up a bit more elegantly than it is. As for whether I'll read the sequel... I'm sure it will be readable enough, but I'm not sure whether I really want to invest such a big chunk of my precious reading time in another hefty chunk of Tudor history. It's not like I'm going to get any surprises - Boleyn gets beheaded, Henry marries Jane Seymour, she dies in childbirth, Henry marries Anne of Cleves, Cromwell gets beheaded. I'd have to be convinced it's worth spinning that out into another 600 page plus novel.
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