Page turner: 5/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought provoker: 10/10
Overall: 3 stars (I can’t officially bring myself to give it 3.5, but I unofficially can’t help it)

Wolf Hall, by Hillary Mantel has gotten a lot of press. I remember it getting the Booker prize 4 years ago and thinking, ‘I definitely should read that’. I do love historical fiction, so an award-winning, highly acclaimed work of historical fiction sounded brilliant. But, bizarrely, I tried, and failed. I couldn’t get into it, so after slogging through the first couple of chapters I gave up. A few years letter, Hillary Mantel’s second novel in the same series called Bringing up the Bodies also receives the Booker prize. ‘Right,’ I think, ‘if this author’s second book has ALSO won the durn prize, I must have been missing something. I must have.’ It took 2 more attempts, but I now admit that my first impressions were wrong. Patience is a virtue – one that I really must learn to cultivate.

The book itself is clearly a work of incredible brilliance. Hillary Mantel’s writing is just so well crafted. And clever. The word-play, particularly around some of the other characters names, is brilliant. Now, I know the character of Thomas Cromwell himself is meant to be clever (many historians have portrayed him as conniving) but the author has to be even more clever to create a being that embodies that oh so well. And somehow Mantel even makes him likeable, and intriguing.

In some ways the book actually is reminiscent of I, Claudius, which having also just read I can’t help but mention. But Mantel’s characterization of Cromwell is much deeper, I think, than Graves’ of Claudius. I related to Cromwell, and his surroundings, a great deal more.  And though similar amounts of intrigue and nastiness is going on around them, Wolf Hall is much darker than I, Claudius. And as such, I like it much more.

The darkness of the book, the tone, is probably what made those first 30 pages so impenetrable for me. Which in retrospect I understand. But to have to try 3 times to start a book – I can’t quite forgive it. Admittedly once I got into it I was drawn so ever-deeper, but I never really felt like I had to keep going, that I had to know more. Now, perhaps the fault is more my own in that as I am more familiar with the Henry VIII time-period in which it is set, I did fundamentally know what was going to happen to the main characters in the story. Which, to be fair, makes the author’s task all the more difficult. But, I am not the type of person who likes knowing how things turn out from the beginning.  I found the whole premise of the movie, Titanic, incredibly challenging. So, I admit to some bias.

I have to call out the fact that I’ve given it a 10 for ‘thought provoker’. I really struggle to give things perfect scores. Really. But I don’t know how a book could be better word-smithed, or from such an unusual perspective, or to be so enveloping. I did periodically think I was IN the book. And, as the book is quite complex and I had to re-read bits of I, I cannot fathom how a book could have more subtlety and creativity. Perhaps it was that enveloping feeling of being surrounded by the book that meant I didn’t feel hugely compelled to *keep* reading. Stagnant isn’t quite the right word, but you can, hopefully, see what i mean.

So, if you are considering reading this book, here is what I recommend:

Imagine everything you think of when you think about a ‘beach read’. Completely inverse it. That’s Wolf Hall. So read it, just don’t bring it anywhere near sand.