Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

Hans Holbein, Thomas Cromwell

(February) So I went into Wolf Hall with a certain amount of skepticism, first, because I gorged myself on Henry-VIII-and-his-wives books, TV shows and movies when I was a kid, and thought I was jaded, and, second, because of the comments at the copy-editing list and elsewhere about the sloppy pronominal antecedents.

But I really, really liked it -- Cromwell as the "good guy" and More as the "bad guy"? That was fascinating. And I thought the ambiguous-pronoun business was effective in the end. After a few backtracks to figure out whether it was Cromwell, Wolsey or Henry thinking or speaking, I decided Mantel was making the point that one of Cromwell's great talents was the ability "get into the head of" the magnate he was serving (or anyone else's, really). It was a cool effect. In fact, the narrative would have quite a different quality if the antecedence were "properly" copy-edited.

Despite the date stamp on this post, I didn't finish reading Wolf Hall till May 14. I waited in line for it at the library three times, through a 150-odd person queue each time. Which tells you: I liked it enough to wait for it three times, but not enough to buy it. I endured three long waits for it because it was compelling, fresh... even haunting. But it was not hard to wait.

"Is it me or ---?" comment: I think Mantel has Cromwell and his scholar friends inventing the internet at one point. Their dream system for organizing books was very internetty, anyway. Fun.