historical – Page 2 – Great books blog

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.

Page turner: 5/10
Heart tugger: 6/10
Thought provoker: 9/10
Overall: 3 stars

I, Claudius is number 14 on the Modern Library’s top 100 books of the 20th Century. I can see why. This is a book I very much appreciate for its astuteness and unusual voice. I am pleased I read it and my brain was very much engaged (I even occasionally chuckled) but I’m not sure I Really Liked it.

As the title suggests, the book is an ‘autobiography’ of the Roman Emperor Claudius, of his life before he became emperor in AD 41. His full name is Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. The stories and intrigues of his life, as really the only surviving member of his family through an incredibly political period of Roman history, are fascinating. And the events (I discovered afterwards) are all true. His thoughts and personal opinions are of course fictional, but by all accounts, plausible, given that his personal papers were all burned just prior to his death. As such, the book does a fantastic job of presenting itself as a history (Claudius himself is a historian) and in the book the occasional indentation appears where the date is simply noted in the margins. I’ve never seen that before. But it is a useful metric of marking time, which flows in fits and starts in the book to coincide with the more interesting portions of his life – or this lives of those around him.

So the era, the presentation, and the stories themselves are fascinating. And Robert Graves does an amazing job of giving Claudius an intelligent, thoughtful, occasionally irreverent tone of voice that is very compelling. Claudius is believed by many of his family as an idiot – he stammers (which gets worse when he’s nervous) and has a few physical tics – but as a reader you cannot help but like Claudius. He has a heart.

And yet, despite these excellent elements, I didn’t find myself that eager to read more. I put the book down for a few days. There are a lot of people and names. Many of the names are very, very similar. It gets confusing and tangles. And whilst you feel for Claudius, and he describes some of the despicable deeds of others, I somehow didn’t connect. I never really got angry when the poisoners poisoned and the beheaders decapitated. Now, I can put this down to Claudius’ self-professed career as an unbiased historian, so it is very much in-keeping with his character. But that doesn’t make it a particularly enjoyable read, it just makes those who have read it appreciate the author’s skill.

So, would I recommend? If you want something a bit intellectual, and you like history – then yes. To read something that you will appreciate having read? Most certainly? But if you want to be entertained, moved, or empowered? Maybe skip it and come back when you’re feeling a bit more cerebral. Or want to catch up on your Roman history without having to actually read a history book.