Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel

A very engaging read. I was forever moving while growing up and thus forever starting at a new school. For some reason wherever I went they were always just starting on the Tudors and Stuarts! Even when I did history A level it was them again. Mantel succeeds in creating a very real world for them, far more so than any of those history lessons.

How do we really know if we are getting inside the mind of a historical person like Thomas Cromwell? We don't have any access to their inner thoughts, only to some of their possessions and actions, and to whatever of their writings might have been a sincere expression of their heart – which is also our call about which are the sincere ones. We also have what others might have written about them at the time, usually displaying every conceivable bias. All you can say of such characters is that they are convincing, or at least plausible, that they are consistent with such facts as are known, or not consistent: and that they are consistent with themselves, or not. Not very different from fictional characters then.

The consistency test isn't easy to apply because everybody is a mass of contradictions in fact. Cromwell is supposed to be a bully but he's also sensitive and compassionate. He's supposed to come from the gutter but he's a full renaissance man. He's supposed to be extrovert and task focussed but in fact he's emotionally intelligent with a rich interior life. He is a devout Protestant at times but he has slept around without it really troubling him too much – there is the odd twinge of conscience.

Mantel gets round some of this by having him wonder what to make of himself once or twice – does this work? But there seems a huge gap between the blacksmith's lad growing up rough in Putney and Henry VIII's courtier. Although his marriage to Liz and his responses to her death and the children's is supposed I think to help bridge this gap, as a psychological and emotional growth point, there already seems to have been a massive change within him. Somehow it seems to have taken place while he was off campaigning as a rough soldier in Italy or during his next career as a hard bargaining cloth merchant. I'm not sure either feels terribly likely, but then people are unlikely. Isn't Cromwell still a mystery at the book's end?

Mantel's style is full of good things, especially her descriptions of people and weather. But her way of presenting Cromwell's inner life, as "he" is sometimes confusing. You don't always know for a few sentences which "he" in the dialogue is Cromwell and when she spells it out in a little parenthesis it is a bit clumsy.

Mantel has axes to grind with the reputations of the key figures: Wolsey first. She is committed to the view that Wolsey is a thoroughly humane person and a very good thing for England. She seems to be consciously re-writing the view that he was a power-hungry manipulator. He comes over very sympathetically in her incarnation of him, and as a profound man of prayer in spite of his appetite for good living.

Henry VIII next. I was really surprised to find the portrayal so amiable, not all the ferocious monster of memory, who demands his own whims on pain of slaughter. She has him desperate to be liked! You can see through her eyes how this leads him into difficulties with other people's expectations, in ways that can only tangle him up more and more until he reacts in frustrated anger instead of using his moral and spiritual compass. It's alarming to see how far Mantel pushes the view that Henry is a confused but sincere Christian.

And finally the sainted Thomas More. She really does not like him, does she. He's a hypocrite, burning and torturing in the name of Christ and doing what he can to evade the pain and terror he has inflicted on others when it comes home to himself. He is a misogynist, heartless to his own wife, and a clever manipulator of others. He is a perverse aesthete, punishing his body in sado-masochistic ways. Inhuman and inhumane, he grinds people under the wheels of his principles and sneers at their misery: a most unattractive figure and a strong riposte to the Saint of Catholic legend.

Last reflection on historical method. I think I'm right in believing that there has been a shift from the "history is the actions of great men (and a few women)" school towards the one that says "history is the aggregate of ordinary people's lives." It's hard to pin down where Mantel is on that spectrum. On the one side, the stuff about Henry desperately needing an heir, and moving heaven and earth, or at least Rome and Katherine, to get one, and thus coming into conflict with popes, emperors, kings, dukes and councillors, is all there in full. On the other hand everything arises in the context of the invention of the printing press, the attitudes of women to divorce, the state of the weather and the cloth trade, street catcalls, the spread of diseases and all the warp and woof of daily life. A definite case of both/and for Mantel. I can't wait to read the next one!