Wolf Hall

⚖The case for it

The book opens with a boy on the ground being kicked by his father, and readers say they are hooked before a single courtier appears. What Mantel builds from there is a blacksmith’s son with an interior life, a watchful operator rather than the usual Tudor villain. The present tense puts you “sitting on Cromwell’s shoulder, watching events unfold,” and the humour is dry and constant, “hilarious and devious exchanges and dialogs” including the running joke of calling a courtier Call-Me. The research never lectures; readers say it sent them looking things up on their own. Critics call the prose “lyrically yet cleanly and tightly written.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Mantel writes “he” for Cromwell without naming him, and in a room full of courtiers that makes it “almost impossible to know who is speaking.” There are “eight Thomases in this story,” several Marys besides, and readers keep a cast list open beside the book. Dialogue runs unattributed for stretches that have to be read twice. The first two hundred pages move so little that one reader could “only equate reading this to Chinese water torture.” Without Tudor background the crowd of earls and ambassadors stays a crowd. Even a sympathetic critic finds the characters “remain unknowable, their emotions closely guarded.”

— the honest librarian

13h

honest hours

19

sittings