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[skygiants]

Months ago schiarire told me that Hilary Mantel was writing a book set in Tudor England, to which my response was basically "wow, she is writing a book FOR ME."

(Look, I know I am not the only person here to confess to an enormous fascination with those wacky Tudors. I would say, 'in my defence, I liked them before it was cool!' On the other hand . . . I don't think there ever was a time when it wasn't cool. But I didn't know it was cool when I was eight!)

Anyway, Wolf Hall is a biopic novel about Thomas Cromwell, a man of Humble Origins who became extremely powerful and influential with Henry VIII during the years of wacky shufflings when he was trying to ditch Katherine and marry Anne Boleyn. Cromwell has been portrayed pretty negatively in Tudor media before, generally as contrasted against Saintly Thomas More (see: A Man for All Seasons) and Mantel is pretty clearly writing against that, showing him a as a logical and clear-thinking as well as ambitious person who is trying to create a different kind of country than the one he grew up in. People of rank frequently remark that Cromwell is a person, with mild surprise; the line that sticks with me is where he's thinking about the struggle to get people to accept Anne Boleyn, and muses that a country where Anne Boleyn could be queen might be a country where Cromwell could be Cromwell.

Mantel is also really, really good at writing complicated politics, and the way they do and don't intersect with the personal - how political enmity can be a kind of friendship, and alliances can turn to enmity like that. I think it's a very good book. I didn't love it the way I loved A Place of Greater Safety, but that's possibly because the emotional intensity did not run quite so high. It's a more logical, quiet book, to fit the protagonist.

Also - I can't quite put my finger on why, but for some reason I felt like this book was a lot better for women than the others of hers I've read. Which is weird, because it's not like there were all that many of them. But, I don't know. An Experiment in Love and The Giant, O'Brien are the kind of books that make you feel like there is no way to be female and happy, at all, ever. A Place of Greater Safety does not make you massively depressed to be a woman but it does not make you feel like as a woman you can have much of an impact on anything either. In a weird way Wolf Hall does not have so much of that distinction, which is bizarre, considering it is Tudor England and you would think it would have even more of one. (And I love Mantel's portraits of Mary Boleyn and Jane Seymour, especially.)

Maybe the thing is that this book opens a bit of a broader world for everyone - and speaking of, it was SO WEIRD to reach the end of a Mantel book and not feel like the world was entirely a hopeless and crushing place! I was utterly boggled until I realized that she is currently writing a sequel which will presumably take us to Cromwell's execution and remedy that oversight.

Anyway, while I am talking about Tudors, I am curious: how much of a widespread phenomenon is Tudorphilia? Are the Tudors crazy overrepresented? Does everyone know the names of Henry VIII's six wives growing up? I feel like it's a bit of trivia that people are way more likely to know than, uh, any other piece of English-history trivia, and not only because of John Rhys Meyers (though the overrepresentation has increased in recent years). But I could be wrong on this. I would like to know all of your thoughts!

Comments

[obopolsk.livejournal.com]

People thought I was weird growing up for knowing the names of Henry VIII's wives, so I don't think it's too widespread (but I do think you're right that it's one of the better-known bits of English historical trivia).

Anyway, I'm glad you liked Wolf Hall! One of the things I thought was most interesting about it from a writerly/storytelling perspective was how incredibly tight the POV is through the whole book. It was really impressive to me that Mantel could paint the period so richly while staying so deeply in Cromwell's head the whole time.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I thought that was really interesting too! Especially since the other big historical epic of hers I've read was very much a multi-perspective book, so it was fascinating to see how she handled it here. After some initial jarring, I really like the way that she almost never used Cromwell's name, just using the pronoun - so whenever you see "he" used, by the end of the book, you almost assume it's Cromwell that it's referring to. Which is such a cool technique for centering a narrative in somebody's head!