Review: Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Such mixed feelings!

It felt brilliant but contrived, slow yet action-packed, dull yet fascinating.

It's a lot of words, and a lot of deeds.

The writing is convoluted and the kind of style where you want to give yourself a gold star every time you figure out what its saying.

When I paused around the 400-page mark to read some other stuff, I didn't really want to pick it back up. But when I forced myself to I didn't want to put it back down???

What a mystery.

In general, the story follows the mechanations and manipulations of Thomas Cromwell, a man who began life as a blacksmith's son and eventually rose to become the king's righthand man.

There's a whole mess of characters that are hard to keep track of - particularly as everyone seems to have multiple names/titles - but there is a list at the front of the book to refer back to.

There's definitely plenty in this book that I didn't follow - it's a lot, and the writing is such that the author goes out of her way to make us work for it. But the general gist of what's going on gets easier as it goes along and we finally start to figure out who is who.

There's also no real goal - it's a portrait in time, following the big players of the English court during the early 1500s. Cromwell has his own status and power which continues to grow, but there's no real goal stated. I found it difficult to follow along at first with no purpose, but then I also found that I never wanted to put it down. Somewhow this mess of characters had sucked me in.

It was a strange experience for me - I was desperate to be done with it because it was such a tough slog, but at the same time I never wanted to leave it unfinished. I still found I wanted to know what would happen, and now I'm keen to move on to the sequel (after a well-earned break!)

This is not an easy read by any means, but fans of historical fiction will be well-rewarded if they persevere.

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