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Despite Anne Boleyn being manipulative and cruel, she is depicted as fully human and worthy of compassion. After years of scheming to get Henry to denounce his first wife, Anne is barely capable of standing or even of enduring the weight of the crown, once it's placed on her head in a ceremony where she is small and vulnerable. I wanted to write a separate review for the entire trilogy because Mantel deserves that. I firmly believe that this is the best piece of historical fiction I have ever read and may ever read. Daring, bold, and a tribute to the history itself, Cromwell's story thrives in these novels. I’m a major fan of Tudor History and as a general rule, I now only ever read non-fiction books on the subject, but the Wolf Hall trilogy is an exception. Unless readers are totally opposed to historical fiction of any kind, Tudor fans should find the trilogy (or at least what we’ve been able to read of it so far!) intelligent, clever and haunting.
She added: ‘When we offer historical fiction to the public, we do have responsibilities – to our readers and to our subjects. We shouldn’t condescend to the people of the past, nor distort them into versions of ourselves. We should be wary about the received version. We should not pass on error. We should seek out inconsistencies and gaps and see if we can make creative use of them.’ The writing sparkles. "...the air as damp as if the afternoon had been rubbed with snails." Much earlier in the series, Princess Mary is described as having a face like a thumbnail. Her personality suits her appearance, small, fragile, and inexpressive. Once she's been fed, she gains her strength and gets mean. It took a while to hit her stride. She was drawn to historical fiction from the start, but, as she said in her 2017 Reith Lectures, ‘I was subject to a cultural cringe. I felt I was morally inferior to historians and artistically inferior to real novelists, who could do plots.’ In the mid-Seventies she wrote a novel about the French Revolution, but was unable to find publisher to take it on. At the time, historical fiction, she said later, ‘wasn’t respected or respectable’. One agent turned it down, she said, because they expected that it was ‘bound to be about ladies with high hair’. (The book, A Place of Greater Safety, was eventually published in 1992.)Because Mantel has taken a well known era of Tudor History and made it refreshing by focusing on a historical figure integral to that time who is not normally put front and centre in historical fiction. Thomas Cromwell is also a fascinating character – mentally sharp, loyal and strategic, witty and vengeful, and ultimately very human. Wolf Hall series one is available to watch on BBC iPlayer in the UK and on the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel in the US and is available from Banijay Rights. Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light will begin filming across the UK soon. Further information will be announced in due course. Because the first two books have been excellent examples of great historical fiction – impeccably researched and highly imaginative. Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner. The morning’s circumstances are new and there are no rules to guide us. That combination of taking something that is so firmly in the public consciousness and seeing it as though for the first time, combining it with a deftness in her handling of the source material, ensured that Wolf Hall instantly impressed the critics.
This series truly has everything. Compelling characters, sharp, witty prose, and a gripping, high-stakes setting. The Tudor period has undeniably been done to death in all forms of historical fiction, but Hilary Mantel breathed new life into it with her unique take on the previously much-maligned Cromwell. I found this trilogy utterly engrossing, so much so that I binged it. Reading it took one full month, almost to the day.
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Desde que abrió quise hacerme con el libro, pero a veces las cosas pasan por un motivo, y entre que no había podido ir, y no me había dado tiempo, no lo he leído hasta esta semana. Ahora sé que es porque los libros nos escogen, una de las cientos de frases que he subrayado en el libro, porque tenemos que estar preparados para abrazar lo que el destino nos trae. It’s worth recalling that, before Mantel, Thomas Cromwell barely inhabited the public imagination: if recognised at all, he was often conflated with his distant descendant Oliver,’ says Penn. ‘Today, he has supplanted in our imagination that “man for all seasons” Thomas More, in whose conviction and execution for treason Cromwell himself played a key role.’ Colin Callender, CEO of Playground, says “Following the success of the BAFTA and Golden Globe winning original television adaptation of the first two books in Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed Wolf Hall trilogy, we are thrilled and honoured that, nine years later, we have been able re-unite Peter Kosminsky and his brilliant team, in front of and behind the camera, to bring Thomas Cromwell ‘s final chapter to the screen. Intimate, thrilling, and deeply moving, The Mirror and the Light shines a fresh light on the politics of power and the personal price paid by those who wield it. Cromwell’s story is as contemporary as ever – a story of loyalty and betrayal that just happens to be about people 500 years ago.” When Mantel published Wolf Hall, she was 57 years old and the author of nine previous novels. Extraordinarily various, they were the output of a writer with very dark wit, who seemed unconcerned about courting popularity. She had always been in love with the sheer complexity of history. Her preparation for the Wolf Hall trilogy was her 1992 historical novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. This vast, multi-viewpoint narrative was almost too much: Mantel was overwhelmingly knowledgable, but this perhaps taught her that a novel with a huge cast of characters needed a single focus, one character before whose eyes history unfolds. I'll give it all stars, although I warn you it's challenging. The first book is brilliant, but the author has a strange style. In the first of the three, she ignores the rules around pronouns and their antecedents, and makes abrupt leaps between times and settings. But it's worth it.
The third book has the high quality of the previous 2, so will be a very strong contender in this years prizes. And oh yes – because the first two books have both individually won the Booker Prize. Of course what we ultimately want from the final book is a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy but it is hard not to get a teensy bit excited about the fact that she could win the Booker again. But more about that later – the book hasn’t even been released yet! In her Booker Prize acceptance speech in 2009, Mantel said: ‘I hesitated for such a long time before beginning to write this book, actually for about 20 years. I couldn’t begin until I felt secure enough to say to my publisher just what a publisher always wants to hear: “this will take me several years, you know”. But they took it on the chin.And why would we want to believe Cromwell was anything other than the villain he has been almost universally painted? Probably because of the tiny details Mantel uses, insignificant in themselves, but which add up to a convincing portrait. Of Anne Boleyn: “What was once sinuous had become angular”; Katherine of Aragon's final resting place: “Well, if you’re dead Peterborough is as good a place as any!”; the Duke of Norfolk "stumps away on his little legs"; Jane Seymour’s eyes “like deep ponds on a still day”; the grooms "dart and swerve like early swallows". It’s the thought world that matters, the mind of the man at the centre of things, the books, the court, the church, the realm . It’s a lesson in how much you can say in so few words. King Henry is lonely but arrogant. He bemoans that he and Thomas Cromwell were never able to go on a friendly outing together to meet the iron masters to see how they crafted weapons. Thomas consoles him by saying they should just imagine how it could have happened. "Let us say the ironmasters gave us their best welcome, and opened their minds to us, and showed us all their secrets." "They must have, ' Henry says. 'No one could keep secrets from me. It is no use to try'". The BBC andMasterpiece PBS have announced that Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, based on the final novel in Hilary Mantel’s multi award-winning trilogy, will begin filming shortly.The six-part series will air on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK. No quiero contar mucho del argumento (podéis encontrar el oficial al final del post), porque quiero que resulte un descubrimiento tan especial para vosotros como lo ha sido para mí. Se trata una historia intimista y auténtica, llena de sueños, de literatura y de cuentos, que gira en torno a una desgracia familiar a través de la que vemos crecer a la protagonista y a los personajes que la rodean. Una oda a la literatura y a la vida, que en el caso de Carolina (la protagonista) son la misma cosa, porque es a través de los libros que nos puede contar su historia y la de sus sueños que se convierten en realidad. With the release of The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel’s long-awaited sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, our resident Tudor nut Amanda Rayner has compiled a brief Q&A for newcomers to the series.
Given its critical and commercial triumph, it’s easy to forget there was no guarantee that the Wolf Hall trilogy would succeed, considering what a huge undertaking it was to offer a new perspective on such a familiar story. But Mantel wasn’t just telling Cromwell’s life story, she was humanising him, inviting us to see the world through him. (‘In fiction you’re exploring the unconscious of history,’ she said a few years ago.) Crucially, by writing in the present tense, she was presenting him as a man who has no idea what’s coming next, even though the reader knows exactly how events are going to play out. Mantel thus creates suspense in a story that in theory should contain very little. The inevitable question remains: how long can anyone survive under Henry’s cruel and capricious gaze?Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. Those six words, resonant with almost anyone who went to school in Britain, have become shorthand for the extraordinary story of Henry VIII and his six wives. Cromwell’s ending may be common knowledge, but Mantel still managed to maintain both her readers’ and the critics’ enthusiasm for his story over a period of 11 years. I actually got chills when I saw the billboard in Leicester Square with the Tudor Rose and the words ‘So now get up.’ I was so excited to get my hands on The Mirror and the Light after 8 years of waiting! This is not intended to be a full statement of all your rights under the Distance Selling Regulations. Full details of your rights under the Distance Selling Regulations are available in the UK from your local Citizens' Advice Bureau or your Local Authority's Trading Standards Office.
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