WOLF HALL
By Hilary Mantel
Fourth Estate. 650 pages. £18.99
ISBN 978-0-00723-018-1
I guess we all know the story: Henry’s frustration and infatuation, the break with the Pope, Anne’s rise and fall. Wham, bam, England has turned Protestant in a rather inglorious way. Hilary Mantel has entered this tired territory and triumphed. Her 650-page novel relays the story from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, highlighting the detail of the period and offering a very sympathetic portrait of arguably the key figure in the break from Rome.
The book starts with a beating: Cromwell’s at the hands of his drunken blacksmith father, and so we are introduced our subject and his times. From that moment of childhood we leap to Cromwell in Wolsey’s service, surviving Wolsey’s fall and rising to become Henry’s most trusted adviser. The book ends abruptly with Anne still Queen Consort, but Henry about to visit Wolf Hall where the dalliance with Jane Seymour will begin.
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