itt WOLF HALL the book by hilary mantel and the upcoming hbo/bbc miniseries based on the same

really dug this book, thought there was a thread about it, guess not, anyway, excited for this

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bbc-hbo-team-wolf-hall-263566

im intrigued, tell me more

The book jacket featured at the link is a total mess.

*loses interest*

really good historical fiction about thomas cromwell

done right would be like the tudors but good

whoa. the book is fantastic (place of greater safety, about the terror in paris, is also good but not nearly as good as wolf hall). i am stoked for the sequel but mantel has been very ill and in and out of hospital for quite some time. i didn't realize it actually had a publication date set.

the main character is a total fantasy - brilliant, world-wise, badass, a family man, and happens to be completely enlightened vis-a-vis the warped values of his society. so this should be huge.

UK cover

this book kicks ass!

man, nothing?

i think the language is really great. really fluid and choppy, and the present tense really jarring; i still am not used to it. the time and scene shifts are very cinematic i think. mantel has a great ear for dialogue.

i looked up most of the principals on wikipedia and now have an idea of who gets the chop. so now the dramatic question as a reader is when the book ends! (is it a spoiler if it happened 500 years ago?)

idk if the main character is a "total fantasy"? i mean the basic details of his climb: "ruffian", soldier, lawyer, trader, adviser, burgess, etc, are all a matter of record. and the early modern/reformation period was full of people with ideas on the "warped values of his society"!

hey man! knew you would dig this, i dont really have anything smart to say about it, but it ruled

i only know this history in the most basic outline. uhhh, king wants a divorce, break with rome happens, england gets protestantism but not like super-protestantism, and that's it.

yeah i'm really impressed so far!

took me a bit to get used to one of mantel's stylistic choices: unless very obviously noted as someone else, the pronoun "he" is always Thomas Cromwell.

also i'm realizing that knowing this is going to be an HBO joint has put a certain look of things in my mind.

yeah i had this kind of half-baked notion about the way mantel uses "he" and the rise of the subject, cromwell as first modern man or something, but i dont really remember the book well enough

oh cool

http://www.4thestate.co.uk/2011/11/wolf-hall-sequel-bring-up-bodies-hilary-mantel/

i thought this was really fun, i liked how unabashed and romantic it was, am not really looking forward to the tv show tho

Anyone read the sequel yet? I'm waiting on a copy from interlibrary loan.

im about 30 pages into it and so far it seems very much the same

oh good, i need to pick that up. i started reading WH all over again, cos it took me a while to adjust to the style and keep everyone straight, there's things i didn't pick up on the first time. the dialogue is so much fun, really tight, really revealing.

his son is such a dunce but so amiable and lovable. everything with mary boleyn is so heartbreaking.

there's something going on about motivation, the intersection of desire, the 'inner life' and ideology at the moment of formation -- all that stuff about protestantism and capital was being made during the course of these events. cromwell doesn't seem to know himself. iirc there are moments where he asks why he's doing all this and he doesn't really know, "what else is there but affairs?"

Lamp what do you mean by "unabashed and romantic"?

this book is incredible

Am reading A Place of Greater Safety, the schtick is v v similar. Still great.

this is a cool way to learn abt history

I held onto this book for about a year from the library but couldn't get past the first page -- not that I outright hated it or anything, more just, "Hm, well, maybe later." Then someone just recalled it from me so...maybe later.

I'm actually reading APoGS with a book on the french revolution in the other hand, to clarify as i go. It's not essential but it's a pretty big sweep of history, helps to have a bit of background knowledge. Don't think that was so much of a problem with Wolf Hall, sure I occasionally forgot who was who in the vast cast but the main plot was pretty specific & localised.

wikipedia.org

yeah yeah. i wanted more detail. fewer electrons.

ok bring up the bodies is in my possession

gotta finish this

i'm waiting for the new one to go into paperback

lagxxn tell me how it is

i wish theyd just put all books in paperback, hardcover is stupid

^^^^

ya i cant recall the last time i bought a hardcover but i could not wait

hardcovers are awesome yr both dummies

but they r so giant and expensive

impossible to read on the train

impossible to read because the words are so hard

hardcovers are great except when you move house twice in a month

Hardcovers are great for architecture, art, and history books. P much useless for contemporary fiction though.

that p much makes no sense

i like reading them on the train! paperbacks are too flimsy or perhaps i am just careless and rough but i like the reassuring weight of a hardcover novel in my bag as well, they are less fun to take on planes tho, too big.

i think 'bringing up the bodies' was really good but i always like the parts in stories where the hero has everything going p smoothly and is coming out on top and you can feel the sympathetic flush of success the defining sequence of the book i think is cromwell at home over christmas endlessly cajoling, directing, scheming, joking moving all these people into place with tireless good humor ceding his dead daughters wings to some other little girl, waiting

man i can't wait

the dialogue is just amazing in the first one. all his conversations with his sweet, dim (but not too dim) son are so funny and awkward

hardcovers of popular books very cheap thru' Amazon 2nd hand, got almost pristine Wolf Hall recently for <£3, will maybe read it come holiday.

that p much makes no sense

Why not? I like hardcover books when they have lots of gorgeous pictures to look at and are typically formatted larger, I don't think they are necessary for most fiction. But thats just my personal preference. FWIW, 98% of the fiction I read it in eBook format anyway.

gross

i think 'bringing up the bodies' was really good but i always like the parts in stories where the hero has everything going p smoothly and is coming out on top and you can feel the sympathetic flush of success

― Lamp, Tuesday, July 24, 2012 11:10 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol when more and gardiner where simultaneously marginalized i was so happy for him

i had a few physical correspondences that i couldn't shake

cromwell: al swearingen
anne: sasha grey
henry: tim tebow (older)

lmao oh no

yeah i know

ahhhhhhh hahahahaha

new one seem to be written in a somewhat simpler lighter mode, maybe to reflect cromwells ascension, or maybe by accident, or maybe im imagining it, anyway im gonna miss this guy when there are no more books left

my only complaint is it wasnt nearly as long as wolf hall

well maybe and the third one doesnt exist yet

i need a new book for traveling this weekend, is this it? is the writing really great?

yes

well maybe and the third one doesnt exist yet

haha when i finished 'bringing up the bodies' i immediately read the wikipedia summaries of any character i vaguely cared about

hah I have purposely not spolierized myself which is p lol for a historical novel

ok i'm about 1/4 through this and i'm all in.

damn I really want to read this now

mantel profile http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/15/121015fa_fact_macfarquhar?currentPage=all

Remarkable profile. Unusually bold style for the New Yorker.

and another booker prize

I'm actually reading APoGS with a book on the french revolution in the other hand, to clarify as i go.
― Jesu swept (ledge), Wednesday, June 6, 2012 4:10 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

doing the same w/wolf hall & wikipedia

this book is brilliant

paperback of sequel not due till april 2013 wtf /gettingaheadofmyself

i've had this on my 'list:read/sublist:probably won't read' for a while but based on the enthusiasm here i'm gonna bump it up.

is it historical fiction like the da vinci code or like the holocaust?

its a prequel to the davinci code

Oh FINE, I'll read this. (Also bumping to top of list based mostly on max's enthusiasm if I'm being completely honest.) Usually I don't like historical fiction because it always ends badly, because no one ever writes about all the nameless people of history who DIDN'T make terrible personal choices and therefore didn't make a bad end in a dark alley (or a tower courtyard). But OKAY, JEEZ.

can i read Bring Up The Bodies without reading Wolf Hall first?

you prob could, it does a bunch of recapping, but really its just the 2nd part of the same book, it picks up right where wolf hall left off and everything, recommend starting at the beginning

but i understand that it's much better than Wold Hall and i don't have the patience to read 1000 pages now..

lol who said that, crazy talk

i think maybe i liked wolf hall a lil better but really they are v v similar

reviews..
xpost

thanks for the tip anyway..

from my vantage point of being halfway thru the first book after picking it up yesterday i would say that "better" is relative to the point of irrelevance. this is excellent.

James wood liked wolf hall better

im reading ' a place of greater safety ' now -- her french revolution one and

yall

it

is

so

good

i dont want to read history anymore i just want to read hilary mantels historical novels. i want hilary mantel on the 30 yrs war

hilary mantel on the unification of italy

hilary mantels lenin

Gotta read these books

If someone wants to convince me what makes them so great in two sentences I might be inspired.

i can't imagine that anyone who is interested at all by the premise would fail to enjoy the wolf hall books

Too many years reading academic history books has made this kind of thing hard to get into, but I love the period.

its a better written version of a massive fantasy epic except the people are all real and the only magic is mastery of political intrigues

Well done!

lamp hardcore otm. i was hoping no one else had noticed. i have a developing idea for kind of ripping off the style of these books but applied to a different historical era and disguised in a more fantastical setting.

tom crom, space pirate

not really but that might actually be better

"better written" is of course u+k

lamp super otm

Wolf Hall rly rly reminded me of Dorothy Dunnet's Niccolo series (which is just historical fiction, no dragons or w/e), like i knew WH was more ~literary~ and shit and the Niccolo books happen like a century earlier, but the scenes in my mind all had a really similar feel to them.

to which end i prefer A Place Of Greater Safety because Camille Desmoulins

so dreamy

um i mean because it feels more distinct, more its own book and its own world.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies

i read this earlier this week and was really blown away, its maybe a little ott here and there but altogether a really wonderful essay/lecture whatever

anyway i was... interested to see this

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2280780/Kate-Middleton-plastic-princess-designed-breed-Author-Hilary-Mantel-attacks-Duchess-Cambridge.html

this morning. linked to by matt drudge of all people

You'll want the daily mail thread

i'll say this here rather than on the daily mail thread but this is an amazing piece of writing

Man, I can't believe I waited so long to read these. I just started Bring up the Bodies. I'm trying to pinpoint exactly what makes them so amazing and I can't, really. I just never want to stop reading them.

are you from England?

Nope

I'm just early in Wolf Hall, but really enjoying it. Supposedly I will read the whole thing in time for a book club discussion next weekend, we'll see. I had missed the Mantel-Duchess contretemps linked above, but it's pretty funny -- not surprising that the tabloids and Cameron entirely missed the point of the lecture, or that in "defending" Kate they pretty much illustrated what she was saying. Hillary Mantel seems like an interesting person.

cause i'm not, and i thought that was the main reason i didn't care.

I didn't know there was a thread for this! I love the shit out of these books.

Finally reading A Place of Greater Safety now and I love the shit out of it, too. Max OTM up thread about wanting her to write books about all areas of historical interest to me.

Also, totally reading APoGS while constantly consulting Wikipedia. I didn't have to do that with WH/Bring up the Bodies thanks to 15 + years of obsessive reading about Tudor England, but I don't know jack about the French Revolution, aside from what I've learned from a few tepid History Channel documentaries. Completely agree with lagO_on that this is a great way to learn history.

And I did not know about Dorothy Dunnett, so Niccolo Rising is on my list now, too.

old news now, nice

http://variety.com/2013/tv/international/mark-rylance-set-to-star-in-wolf-hall-bodies-adaptation-1200005566/

i bought BUTB but i'm tearing through WH again first. still so good.

stall about 200 pages into WH; picked up BUTB now it's in pb - need to restart WH and blitz through both

decent docu about Henry VII on BBC2 tonight, still yet to read Wolf Hall but this Tudor season is giving me the yen

There was a decent one on BBC2 last week Henry VIIIs Enforcer: The Rise And Fall Of Thomas Cromwell, not sure exactly what day it was aired, got it off the t0rrents. Got Wolf Hall on the shelf and definitely starting it in the next week.

can somebody explain what this guy means by "the fucking Bullens"?

link

oh duh i just got it

haha n/m

i'm about 35 pages into BUTB and i'm getting a sinking feeling. i hope it gets over the throat-clearing recappy stuff and just keeps going full force.

it also has, i'm guessing, the marks of an editor trying to smooth things out. instead of the characteristic lone "he" which always meant Cromwell, the first several pages are littered with "he, Cromwell" which is really rubbing me the wrong way. she used pronouns so precisely before, idgi

Am I off the mark for thinking that Wolf Hall/BUTB is something that someone who likes ASOIAF's realpolitik machinations over the magical mumbo jumbo would dig?

you would be very on the mark

they're also books about a man who is above all trying to be modern and humane, despite whatever barbarism still exists around him, which also contrasts pretty strongly with martin (in the best way imo)

yeah, read these and then read c v wedgwoods 30 years war

This is probably an inaccurate and lazy thing to observe, but I've always had trouble with Mantel's writing style - specifically her over use of alliteration. I just find it difficult to make it through more than 3-4 pages without pedantic noticing some sentence-writing flaw.

On the other hand I've read evey Steig Larsson book so I guess mmmv.

that seems nuts to me! i think she's got a great eye and a great ear. i can't even think of an alliterative line tbh.

also, that profile of her really opened some things up. her lifelong illness really makes the bodily nature of (political) life really resonate: how people get sick, what they eat, their aging, all that. also her experiences with ghosts; the constant mentions of the england's restless dead, its ghosts and myths lying in wait.

agree

i was wrong to worry about the 2nd book, it's really good.

is this in here? ny'er profiled her before in 2005, haven't read it

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/07/25/050725crbo_books1

i don't have the books nearby so i'll have to trust my memory here but i think mantel has just about the best possible contemporary literary style -- deeply and carefully observant, casually intimate, an almost-inexhaustible sympathy for self-made individuals who easily overflow with pity for those around them. i'm not prepared to argue about alliterative details, but when writers lean too hard on that scheme it lingers for me like a kind of display, whereas Wolf Hall & BUTB feel more like time spent with an especially erudite acquaintance retelling some bit of history i learned by rote.

having said that, BUTB is the lesser of the two for me, by far, partly because the fall of anne boleyn is kind of terrible for all involved, and wolf hall has those early scenes where he watches his wife and daughters die of the sweating sickness, one by one.

...which are just... oy

Wolf Hall -- first ebook I've ever bought.

Good choice. I read that before I had an ereader and I nearly threw out my back carrying around.

...which are just... oy

Yes. I can still remember the jolt I got reading "Grace died in his arms". The suddenness of that sentence was brutal.

What breed of doggy does Cromwell own?

Ok, how the deuce are they going to film this? So far, a major feature of the novel is the texture of Mantel's prose and its artful elisions, and a purely historical adaptation would be pretty hollow.

which would stop them from filming it how?

Thanks, I'd forgotten my cynicism.

don't mention it

"It's The Tudors with 'Tude"

yeah i think to be true to the spirit of the books could be kind of risky! hewing to cromwell's experience so closely, being his partisan as mantel is, would probably mean dropping the a, b, c, d etc story structure --everything parceled out evenly, a little something for everybody -- of the newer cable dramas

idk it'd just be very tiring for the lead actor, who's in every scene.

other than that, i felt mantel's style here was very conducive (even borrowing from) the to-the-pointness of contemporary TV. her dialogues even felt very HBO to me in some way.

you couldn't do any of her reveries though, which is a lot of the charm of the books. but that's true with any book with some lyricism i guess.

i spent a *lot* of time while reading place of greater safety thinking about how id treat it for tv

these books are basically the sofia coppola marie antoinette of historical lit but done really well, they should just roll with it, chuck taylor hi tops in every scene, thomas more forced to choose between his bodily safety and his factory 12"s

Amused so far how Henry is this capricious, quasi Old Testament deity that hovers concretely yet remains on the periphery and whom everyone wants to please, and that the only figure whom we've seen in the narrativeand who has actually interacted with Him is a religious authority.

Oops, spoke too soon, here's our king now.

Thank the heavens for Putney boatmen.

So I'm about 72% of the way through this (goddamn Kindles, this disgusts me) and wow! Most I've enjoyed a book for a good long while.

One of the things I'm enjoying most is how much Mantel leaves unsaid - both in terms of plot, where Cromwell's progression from vague sympathiser with the reformist cabal transitions pretty briskly into him and Cranmer as CHIEF reformers, as well as in Cromwell's own emotional perspective and understanding of events.

For instance, the process by which he draws inexorably further away from Wolsey during the Cardinal's fall, always reiterating in his own mind his (clearly unfeigned) affection and respect for his mentor, his certainty that he is only staying at court to be Wolsey's eyes and ears etc. Yet as Wolsey falls off the radar Cromwell continues to rise, and gains respect on all sides for how loyal he's been. No wonder he breaks down crying.

I'm a sucker for the way that ur hero, omnicompetent yet sympathetic progressive thinker, is also a kind of wonderful murderous street-fighting alpha male fantasy. Again, so much left unsaid - the occasion that More threatens TC in his own home, swiftly followed by More's demise as a major player. Or the time that Cromwell thinks to himself that if More, terrifying sadistic zealot Thomas More, goes near any of Cromwell's household, HE will drag More out into the street and smash his head in on the pavement - and you believe him. Total badman.

Have to say I'm quite glad that you can't get 'Hilary Mantel does....' for every different period, as I'm not sure I'd ever want to read anything else again.

idk if the main character is a "total fantasy"

oh come on. he's like if james bond had a sensitive side. he's dirk pitt. he is AWESOME at EVERYTHING and is STRONG and SILENT. women want to be with him, men want to be him, etc

finally reading bring up the bodies--the extended bit w/ the joust where crumb reminisces about the portuguese knight he met in venice before rafe sadler breaks in and they rush to the king's side is AMAZING, what a sequence

Yeah I can't decide whether to go straight into BUTB when I finish Wolf Hall or to leave off for a month and treat myself to it in my time off next week. How does it compare to Wolf Hall in length?

*next month, not next week

shorter, maybe 2/3ds as long, the first bit is a lot of summarization of WH so if you go right from one to the next you might get impatient

yeah otm

on 2nd read my fave bit in WH was the long fever reverie when cromwell falls ill, and the big 'reward' after of henry coming to his house.

i'm dreading the 3rd one because, you know

i read somewhere that its just through jane seymour so we might not get all the way up to *draws finger across throat*

you can see glimmers of that in BUTB. how national policy turns on the king's mood, and therefore manipulating it; how easily people can be tossed aside

there's also the funny through line in both that the course of the english reformation hinged on anne giving blowjobs

fave bits in BUTB: his double explanation to 'risley' and to himself why (that one courtier whose name escapes me) is to be spared: for the amoral risley it's a machiavellian answer, for himself it's a long passage about what a soulful and true young man he is, who shouldn't be ground up in all this bullshit.

oh, and the execution, which was p stunning

Ah shit, I've gotta drop out this thread until I'm done with Bodies I think. As has been noted earlier itt, I know the history in broad terms, who gets killed and when, but there's still definitely spoilers to be had. the loyalties of call-me-risley are still up in the air where I am in the book, for example.

Gotta say that I'm most definitely looking forward to the demise of Anna Regina, the bitch

the loyalties of call-me-risley are still up in the air where I am in the book, for example.

don't worry, they stay that way! maybe that's already a spoiler tho

how happy were you all to see rafe land the hot widow

The section meditating on More's and Barton's coming punishments and his dream of his daughter is killing me with its mix of death and pathos. That list of Barton's belongings is so increasingly sad.

No BUTB thread, but I'm enjoying the second book a lot more because Mantel's making the politics a lot more obvious, whereas in WH, I got the sense that it was shrouded in stylistic hijinks.

Also, someone should gift WH to Scalia, think he'd enjoy it.

keep losing my thread but nearly through this now

skipped to the end to check the pagecount and discovered there's an interesting interview w/mantel and an essay on writing historical lit. both prob interesting & worth reading before finishing the book

what happened to the tv show is that gonna me on

also normal sized hardcovers (ie BUtB) give you tiny balls but smaller size hardcovers rule the school

October story in the Guardian

The actor Mark Rylance is to be reunited with the director of the television drama about the death of the weapons inspector Dr David Kelly for an "intensely political" £7m BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall novels.

Peter Kosminsky, the award-winning director of a string of docu-dramas based on contemporary events – including Channel 4's The Government Inspector, which starred Rylance as Kelly – may at first glance appear an unlikely choice for a historical costume piece.

However, Kosminsky shares with Mantel a reputation for indepth research – the Wolf Hall author spent five years investigating the 16th-century historical background to her narrative on the grim political machinations of Henry VIII's court.

Rylance will play the main protagonist, the Tudor king's adviser Thomas Cromwell, in the six-part adaptation of Wolf Hall for BBC2, which is expected to be broadcast in 2015. The BBC will also broadcast the sequel Bring Up the Bodies and producer Company Pictures has an option on the as-yet-unpublished final book of Mantel's Tudor trilogy, The Mirror and the Light.

Wolf Hall follows Cromwell's career as he ascends from a lowly start as a blacksmith's son to becoming an indispensable ally of Cardinal Wolsey, succeeding him as Henry's VIII's chief adviser after Wolsey's downfall.

Kosminsky said: "This is a first for me. But it is an intensely political piece. It is about the politics of despotism, and how you function around an absolute ruler. I have a sense that Hilary Mantel wanted that immediacy."

love chapuys

catherine is incredible too

My most dear lord, King and husband,

The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe thou forceth me, my case being such, to commend myselv to thou, and to put thou in remembrance with a few words of the healthe and safeguard of thine soul which thou ougte to preferce before all worldley matters, and before the care and pampering of thy body, for the which thoust have cast me into many calamities and thineselv into many troubles. For my part, I pardon thou everything, and I desire to devoutly pray God that He will pardon thou also.

going to be sweet when anne... *finger across throat*

pampering of thy body

o_O

feel like there could def be more than one more book come on

bring us right up to present day, hil

i havent felt this way since the bourne movies that the artist shd be compelled by law to make a new one every year before theyre allowed to do anything else

i want her to finish this up and then we can get some books on other historical subjects

would like to see mantel on italian unification e.g. or one of the russian revolutions.

This fucking book

Spent all day glued to the couch ripping through this, LOVE it

Did you rip through because there wasn't any Project Runway this week? :D

lol no

I even ripped through it all day Sunday without turning on the TV once despite FOOTBALL
which is like O_O

FINISHED

need the sequel. goddamn that was a great book

2/3 of the way through Bring Up The Bodies

shit totally just shifted up a gear am literally planning my evening around reading this now
omg I can't even stand it
srsly how great is this

this is a cool way to learn abt history

― lag∞n, Wednesday, 6 June 2012 14:40 (1 year ago) Permalink

seriously considered calling in sick to read wolf hall last week

i read a place of greater safety and it's great

present continuous

im goin to this

http://www.wolfhall.co.uk/imgs/generic/Wolf-Hall-Bring-Up-The-Bodies.png

I have only read the first novel but it's very good, you could even say brilliant.

The stage version would be a good thing to go to.

i'm reading the first one now, it is brilliant, i'm very happy there's a sequel.

just finished second one

why can't all books be this good srsly

i guess i am the only one in the world who got bored by Wolf Hall

off with yr head

what happened to the hbo/bbc mark rylance series that was supposed to happen?

i guess i am the only one in the world who got bored by Wolf Hall

― nostormo, Monday, March 10, 2014

i got wolf hall for my wife, who devours books and loves historical novels. she didn't get through wolf hall at all. she said it was very well-written, but too cold. i'm going to try reading it sometime soon.

i love the way mantel writes but i am maybe not 100% on her characters? i had to put wolf hall down at least temporarily b/c t crom is like way too good at everything. he is the best at scheming and politickin and he's a bad dude in general. like he's jack reacher.

i mean obv this doesn't last forever given what ultimately goes down but does it ease up in the 2nd one?

Nah.

nope

I kinda missed rafe in the second one, call-me is a poor substitue (and obv crom knows it too)

not a spoiler btw, rafe's just not in it as much

He's getting busy, I hear.

what happened to the hbo/bbc mark rylance series that was supposed to happen?

― max, Monday, March 10, 2014 11:25 AM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah really

its happenin

same script as the play?

play adapt: Mike Poulton

miniseries adapt: Peter Straughan

Filming will commence in Spring 2014 for transmission in 2015

thx!

twenty fifteeeeeeeeeen

that's too long ;_;

transmission

Keeping Cromwell's posse and all the people of court straight is the hardest part about these.

the court ppl i had the hardest time with, lord this & duke that

I still can't really differentiate between Norfolk and Suffolk! Folk them tbh.

totes

Like, one of them is blustery, and the other is... pious and blustery.

norfolk, thomas howard, is part of the boleyn power bloc. suffolk, charles brandon, is married to the king's sister and kind of lacking in real power because the king unhappy about it. please consult the handy vades mecum at the front of ea. volume

so i read her first novel after i'd read these -- 'every day is mother's day' -- and it's an interestingly different beast, reminds me of spark at her most merciless

one thing i saw somewhere about wolf hall: the idea that contemporary literary fiction can't admire or be impressed by its characters but has to hold them at arm's length or disdain them. i think the, like, marysueishness of thomas cromwell is a really interesting thing.

but yeah everyone in EDiMD is horrible; it fails most when it seems like it doesn't want to be even-handedly horrible but accidentally sympathises with them.

she's really good, though

but i fear that wolf hall could be extended indefinitely, so i can see why people could find it boring. well, not indefinitely (he has to die at some point), but certainly it hardly seems to have been tightly plotted (they don't get to wolf hall in the first volume) -- i sort of suspect she's winging it a bit, or was at some point. this is one of her many points of contact w george r r martin

the description of boleyn's final moments was v moving & sad

breaking up the wolf hall saga into three books seems like a decision made based on a place of greater safety, which is great but SO long, and flags in a bunch of different places, and would probably benefit from being crafted or structured as 2-3 sections that would each need to stand alone

that being said im not even sure the butb stands alone, as such

I need this to be at least 5 books.

someone put hilary on the blower, I need her to understand what I'm asking

I think three books is enough but we need to start campaigning for the next series to be about Oliver Cromwell.

I can't imagine how much work and research goes into books like these and if I were Hillary Mantel I'd want to spend the next few years drinking cocktails and writing pulp about teenage s&m vampires.

I don't think I've ever gone into historical fiction knowing less about a character and finishing the book loving the character so completely

ok that made no sense but I stand by it

hah er i bought these on someone's recommendation and left them on the shelf because i was like enh tudors. then i saw the name cromwell in connection with them and started reading them thinking man, i guess i was wrong about the tudor thing, cromwell, awesome. then i realised i was thinking of the wrong cromwell.

max do you think it was a publisher's decision, or something an agent or editor might have nudged her along the path to? it somehow feels not at all internal to the work on some level. and i sort of feel like it could have as easily been one brick as three long romps, and i feel like it would have actually been even better as three tightly plotted short novels, and i wish someone had pushed her either that way or in the direction of brick

on the other hand i feel like she deserves booker winner level publicity and money, so

thomp I did the same thing, like wow this oliver cromwell dude was way more chill than I thought

oy

I don't really know Thom!

I guess I'm partly thinking of a friend who I loaned both the Cromwell books and she finished them quickly but took forever with apogs. Which was similar to my experience. Could very easily just be that apogs is not as good or at least less engaging

well the difference is cromwell. there is no one individual to ride in apogs, nothing like the character she built with cromwell and the way she uses that perspective, which are definitely what pushes those books to another level. but it is still a great book with a lot of the same basic qualities. i don't know how important familiarity with the context is, i feel like everyone kind of knows the henry 8 stuff even if not crom himself? anyway, i wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to someone who enjoyed these books.

if these are better than apogs (of which I have ~350pp left) I canny wait to read em and hope to do so before seeing the plays in june

I'm around half way through APOGS and although it is a good book, Wolf Hall and Bring up the bodies are superior books. APOGS suffers a little from the canvas being just too large, she even apologises at the start of the book for exorcising Dr Marat from the proceedings. Stylistically Mantel has developed a much more sparse style for the Cromwell books, she can cover much more plot in much less text and the sparse style make the key moments stand out all the more poignantly.

I think APOGS has to many individuals, Cromwell provides a dramatic locus that has to be spread over Camille, Danton and Robespierre. The Cromwell books also seem to be much more about families, all of the main characters are grounded in their family units, The royal household, the cromwell household, the seymours, the even outsiders like Chapuis seem to get added and viewed as part of the Cromwell family. Catherine's pain seems to be rooted in her exile from any kind of family. APOGS doesn't have this lens to see things through and is more complex as a result.

Still a great read.

see plenty of householdism in apogs though there isn't a lot of dwelling and within a v large canvas agree

also never hear from marat but he is recurringly present

was gonna say, there are a lot of households in apogs!

I was steeling myself to not really enjoy APOGS as much, and worried that I was reading it to soon after Bring up the Bodies

but I'm enjoying it!

It def does suffer from having such a massive cast of characters, I occasionally get kinda swimmy with the details 'what? who? huh? oh who cares just keep reading' but her ability to make these distant historical figures so human and, idk, alive, is really something

sometimes I wish we didn't have to whisk away from characters so quickly, I'm always looking back over my shoulder as we move onto the next thing like aw man I was just starting to dig those dudes do we have to leave

apogs were great

fun finally reading all the wiki articles for people I knew nothing about before and was avoiding so as not to spoilerise myself

yeah it's like, holy crap EVERY character is a real person

Is the creepy harp player who hangs out with the women folk and cromwell has a hate-on for a real guy?

Oh shit, that's Mark Smeaton isn't it! (I'm just starting BUTB)

lute, dog

Ha, and here I thought he was the most made-up seeming character

The stage version would be a good thing to go to.

it was a good thing to go to difficult to measure it against the book with limitations necessarily imposed most obviously on time and cast but the elisions are neatly done on the whole it's a good brisk sketch. seeing bring up the bodies this week.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2653199/Damien-Lewis-appears-Tudor-custom-play-King-Henry-VIII-new-BBC-drama-Wolf-Hall.html

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/09/article-2653199-1E9CD10400000578-44_634x488.jpg

he doesn't look a thing like tebow

I'm just early in Wolf Hall, but really enjoying it. Supposedly I will read the whole thing in time for a book club discussion next weekend, we'll see. ...

― something of an astrological coup (tipsy mothra), Saturday, 30 March 2013 17:10 (1 year ago) Permalink

Ha. Well, a year and a half later -- I'm done! I really loved this book, but life kept intervening and I would go months without picking it up. Finished the last couple hundred pages on a binge this week (partly thanks to a few long travel days hanging out in airports). The writing is so good, so smart and sharp, and Cromwell is such a great prism to see the whole period through. It would be a much different and less entertaining book told from the POV of any of the royals.

Even though the whole thing obviously has a modern perspective, I like how she resists judging anyone by contemporary standards. There aren't really any good guys, but nobody's exactly evil either -- they're all just pursuing self-interests and reacting to the political world of the time. I will definitely read Bring Up the Bodies, but I might wait a few months -- I like the prospect of getting to hang out with Cromwell some more, I don't want to use it all up too quickly and the third one's not out til (supposedly) next year.

Also: the characters least motivated by self-interest -- the protestant martyrs on the one hand, Thomas More on the other -- are in some ways the least sympathetic. Cromwell (and Mantel) don't have a lot of patience for inflexibility.

there are hints throughout that cromwell (as a proto-modern) understands that making henry's state as powerful as possible will secure life and peace for england's people -- that he for some reason is the only one with a dim memory of the civil wars that henry7 ended. lurking beyond henry8's failed marriage and childlessness was war, this time with possible foreign intervention. (and it happened anyway, under another cromwell)

mantel has a lot of fun making more a misogynist prig, but she doesn't make him wrong. i think she at least gives him the gift of seeing things clearly: there was no good legal reason to get rid of catherine, it was the elevation of desire over law, and using it to turn the country away from the church had more to do with national power than conscience. cromwell at the end has to all but beg him not to die for it. that the misogynist is the only one to feel disgust at what henry's men are doing to catherine is another irony.

there are sentences throughout tho that cromwell doesn't know why he does what he does. "what else is there, but affairs?" etc

oh shiiiit

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/books/review/the-assassination-of-margaret-thatcher-august-6th-1983.html?_r=0

what happened to this hbo series then?

oh I guess it's BBC and PBS now, which means no boobs.

http://deadline.com/2014/12/wolf-hall-preview-damian-lewis-mark-rylance-bbc-masterpiece-1201320301/

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/14/hilary-mantel-attacks-critics-bbc-margaret-thatcher-story-broadcast

A respectably robust response but: "I do wonder about the journalists involved. The paper doesn’t write itself,” she said. “Sooner or later, surely, they must start to feel ashamed of their paper’s attempt to bully and censor?” - hmmmm probably not.

Fucking cannot stand Damian Lewis but still very stoked for this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kT2lMkhldc

January on BBC2....April 2015 on PBS boo
(or sooner on the torr3ntz) weeeeeeeeee

BRING IT ON

I don't know anything about Ben Miles but he seems a decent Cromwell. God bless those torr3nt sites, they bring so much joy into my life!

none of those lines sound familiar at all.

he looks appropriately crusty and grumpy

I've started it. Need to finish it - like everything else I pick up - before I probably inevitably see the play.

tonite

I am so excited I almost made a hot mess!

Fucking cannot stand Damian Lewis but still very stoked for this.

Same, who is this ginger butt even going to play on this.

Only Henry Viii

can't believe newsnight are doing a live reaction to it.

how was it

This felt both rushed and too slow at the same time; and Mark Rylance too fragile and passive as Cromwell, I thought. Twas OK tho.

Yeah, I enjoyed it but can't explain why. It sort of felt superficial AND bogged down in detail.

Watching this tonight but I feel it'll be a let-down after the RSC production, which really rattled through the book but also nailed a lot of it.

I liked it but the tone/rhythm is a bit funny - seems reserved or a bit shy of drama – acting serious w/o being especially serious. I dunno tho', a bit early to judge really & v watchable.

I am quite in love with this after ep 1

DaveM otm

In the book Cromwell is polite to a fault but carries bags of unspoken menace; didn't really see that in Rylance

It also seemed odd to completely bypass Cromwell's rude upbringing which really flavors the entire tone of the book (and establishes that menace, actually, now that I think about it)

Speaking of menace, Jonathan Pryce seemed entirely too doddering for my conception of Wolsey, who I always imagined looking and behaving like a somewhat more brooding version of Alex Salmond

Sculptors re-use their clay and David Annand used the clay of Wolsey's head to model Alex Salmond's!

http://www.ipswichsociety.org.uk/newsletter/dispart.php?issue=187&art=16

of course he did

I enjoyed this but everyone in it feels slighter and more genteel than they should, except maybe Thomas More. I didn't get much menace out of Rylance at all, he seemed actually incredibly understated. Having said that, we've only seen him in family man/loyal servant mode so that's possibly natural and perhaps both character and actor have a way to go.

It also seemed odd to completely bypass Cromwell's rude upbringing which really flavors the entire tone of the book (and establishes that menace, actually, now that I think about it)

They showed him being beaten by his father which is virtually all you see of his upbringing IIRC. It's been a while since I read it though.

Could have done with more in the way of dry humour early on, perhaps. I laughed out loud at the trial scene, and the Boelyns. Looking forward to the scenes with Mary.

Actually there was just the right level off obnoxious little toad coming off the kid playing Mark.

Yeah but that beating establishes everything - our sympathy for Cromwell, the psychological basis for preferring the rationality of the law to the force of a truncheon, but also the intimate knowledge of raw boozy brawling that no one else he has truck with really has an inkling of

I dunno I think I am also possibly simply allergic to televised Tudor costume dramas no matter what their pedigree

The book is so remarkable because of its tone, the way everything is so poised, all relations feel magnetized and suspended precariously in their current patterns, disaster always feels round the corner. Who can forget, having read it, that description of Wolsey in his chamber, and the shadows surrounding him? He becomes something more than a man, he is a force, a spirit-being. You get none of this in the TV show but there's no reason you couldn't, if given the license to be more creative and impressionistic with the photography and soundtrack

Reading the book again and it's astonishing how much of the story is gone. Even the main event, the divorce, seems barely sketched in, a mere backdrop for Cromwell's slowly shifting relations with the other major players, his inexorable gaining of the upper hand. After the last scene of his meeting with the king I thought that just might be enough to keep me watching, though I agree that Rylance lacks menace.

yeah the major "historical" events are sort of backdrop in the book

Intricately detailed backdrops, though. You could pretty much use it as a history textbook, unlike the show.

The scenes with the family were good, and much as I'd imagined them in the book. I welled up a little at the angel scene.

xpost yea and obv more than backdrop, they drive the A-story, but it's all offstage. there's something almost rozencrantz and guildenstern are dead about it in that respect.

In the episode just gone when Alice says "Gregory's been letting us run his dogs in the hall", it's a pale shadow of one of the sweetest scenes in the book. I wish they'd kept it whole, it would really fit Rylance's way with his character.

(Alice) "Oh we are not going to bed. We are running Gregory's greyhounds up and down the hall and making a noise fit to wake the dead."
"I can see why you don't want to break it off."
"Yes, it is excellent," Alice says. "We have the manners of scullery maids and no one will ever want to marry us. If our aunt Mercy had behaved like us when she was a girl, she would have been knocked round the head till she bled from the ears."
"Then we live in happy times," he says.
When she has gone, and the door is closed behind her, Cranmer says, "The children are not whipped?"
"We try to teach them by example, as Erasmus suggests, though we all like to race the dogs up and down and make a noise, so we are not doing very well in that regard."

i especially loved that scene in the book as well.

so this is a tv show now huh

I'm still finding it v watchable, the hour flies by. But I just read the book, and yeah Rylance is good but wrong & it can't give you any sense of immersion in constant microscopic assessment/judgement/decision-making which I find hypnotic in the book. Looks cool though.

my mum, who loves the books, just said he's not broad and big enough (in a character sense as well) and without the element of coarseness - he's not a blacksmith's son. I found the books difficult to get through - a uniform consistency of detail with rhythmical emphasis, but am liking the tv series. And did want to read Bring Up the Bodies as it felt the time-span might suit my attention span better.

i seem to recall a drinking conversation with Ward Fowler where we somehow came to the conclusion that it wasn't twee enough, but have no memory of how we got there now. Rock solid reasoning tho, of that you can be assured.

I understand from a friend who has seen Rylance onstage that actually he's pretty stacked, but the clothing doesn't really bring that out. He reputedly can do bullying and menace very well as well, so the focus on kindly uncle/loyal servant Cromwell at this stage may be a directorial decision.

Idk about 'stacked', he was muscular in Jerusalem but still not particularly broad, and I reckon that was mostly put on for the role, especially as he was previously best known for playing Ariel.

they could crank it up but i suspect fizzles' mum otm - the whole 'looks like a murderer' thing is there from early on in the book - Rylance is a bit shifty-sinister but doesn't have that now.

i'm interested in 'more twee needed' - was that wanting more lutes, codpieces etc (+ a trad roister-doister H VIII), or just a bit more poppy narrative drive? Book's really good imo but a bit restrained.

not codpieces! think it was along the lines of "not enough cute concision", maybe a mildly saccharine musicality.

book is *impressive* even, from the chunk I've read, but not - to me - enormously appealing to read.

that said, I keep wanting to try again because I feel that the detail is not the overload of research that's tied like weights to the prose of some historical writers, but provides or is evident of an almost mystical quality of imaginative historical insight. it's certainly very skilfully managed.

idk she's probably been one of the best writers around for the past few years?

yeah "poppy narrative drive"

there's a hypnotic/immersive quality to the rendering of Cromwell's consciousness that's amazingly handled. She's v good all-round – sense of detail, prose ear & structure, dialogue, thick/deep history, lotsa ideas etc – but that's next-level. Like i think this - "a uniform consistency of detail with rhythmical emphasis" - is true & was wearing on me 3/4 in but it's also what's so absorbing in big reading bursts. ok, yes, I'm saying it's krautrock.

idk she's probably been one of the best writers around for the past few years?

yeah, agree, definitely for England and double def for 'English writers of her generation'. Any reservations I have are from the 'this is great and worth thinking about and picking at' position.

but i don't know really it's not like i keep up with William Boyd

Haven't seen it but a couple of friends of mine who were discussing it last night were mildly outraged that one of the characters said something in Latin and then translated it.

... that's the sort of people I hang out with though.

there was also a subtitled bit of Latin, so it's willing to do the right thing.

I thought i heard them pronouncing Tyndale 'tine-dale' at More's house & was mildly outraged, but then it was def 'tindle' later on. I then thought More might be mispronouncing it deliberately, out of disrespect. But maybe I misheard.

in the book i always chortled when they're like "you can take the boy out of Putney..." in order to burnish Cromwell's hardman credentials

See also Squeeze's 'Up the Junction'

I never thought that it would happen
Me and a girl from Clapham

I bet even Overlord X's Rough In Hackney sounds a bit obsolescently joke these days.

Felt a little underwhelmed by the Fall of Wolsey Play

just watched ep 2. very enjoyable. 'fraid to say more says tinedale, and cromwell and more's wife both say tindle. disrespect only option, but a weird one.

i think whats bugging me about rylances cromwell is that he seems kind of...doddering? confused?

I thought he came a bit more alive in the scene where he was recounting his memories from italy; and have faith he'll come more into himself, and maybe his thug will surface, as the series progresses.

no I don't get doddering or confused. his delivery is fantastic. reminds me on Ian Bannen as Jim Prideaux in TTSS. steady. ep 2 marvellous.

That's is what I am hoping and thought there was some resounding hints of menace to come in his " no need to trouble god, i have it hand" line at the end.

so this aired on pbs last night? right? i missed it.

It's on pbs.org. When did Masterpiece Theater become just Masterpiece? I am old.

they folded mystery into it (as "masterpiece mystery" for a couple years) then dropped that too

I stopped paying attention because there was no buzz from the ILX UK contingent - did it get better, Britishes?

i liked it a lot

It's very good and honestly my biggest complaint is that it is too short

taping, will check it out and report back

i thought it was cracking.

loved every minute of it.

ah crap i meant to set my dvr
will remedy

At first I thought that Rylance was all wrong for the role, too understated, just not menacing enough, and then I kept watching and you realise that understatedness is what makes his Cromwell believable, in a show when virtually every other dude is growling threats through their teeth, he just does not let the mask slip at all.

that alone sounds v Cromwellian

I'm in

THought the tv series was very well done so want to read the books.
Hoping that both book and tv series will eventually take us up to Cromwell's demise. BUt I think that the background interview show said that Mantel now had other pressures than she did when she was writing the earlier volumes. I think it was also saying that the book had a lot more internal goings on with Cromwell showing what he was thinking etc which it wasn't very easy to show visually.

Yeah really want to read the book but I do have quite a long list of to reads so unless I suddenly turn up a charity shop find I'm unlikely to get to it for a while. & i would expect that charity shop finds are likely to be snapped up.

I did notice that Easons the Irish national chain newsagent was featuring both of the existing volumes on one of its main display tables at the moment. Not sure how long that will last with the tv series having ended about a month ago. But good to see something worthwhile getting featured. I think the other end of the same table had Kim Gordon's book in paperback and several of the current bestsellers in between.

The third in the trilogy will deal w/ Cromwell's demise.

Some of the other great casting was Clare Foy's Anne Boleyn and Bernard Hill who is a lot of fun as her ruthless sweary unc Norfolk, just wish they hadn't brought in one note Damian Lewis which almost could have wrecked this series for me. In the end I thought it was A+, probably re-watch it at some point.

I thought the series did get better as it went along; or maybe I just acclimatised to its (and specifically Rylance's) hushed, sombre energy. It's def worth sticking with, anyway. I found the final episode is particularly haunting.

matt dc otm. rylances performance is a real grower. the big issue i had is just that mantels books are such fantastic slow burns, both individually and across both, and its impossible to really let the plot work itself out in only six hour long episodes

found myself doing a mark rylance impression lately bc it's such an enjoyable way to speak

this ruled

I'm watching this now (it's streaming through the PBS channel on the Roku box if you have one of those) and I'm at the part where he loses his wife and daughters and it's absolutely gutting me.

That was sad in the book but holy cow. ;_;

Knowing what was about to happen, I nearly lost my shit at the little girl walking off with the candle and angel wings.

I knowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

When the nursemaids were trying to wake up the girls, god.

I just bumped the ILB books of the 00s thread with the realisation that we somehow managed to poll 101 books without Wolf Hall even placing, and that was in a list containing the fucking God Delusion.

If we polled the whole thing again now WH would probably stand a pretty good chance of winning.

i was into the asynchronicity of the adap; when it started with wolsey's fall i thought the whole thing was gonna be fucked up

i really liked the way the episode handled the int'l political stuff (emperor charles, catherine, the pope etc), w just a little more direct exposition to make it stick. it's sort of hidden in plain sight in the book that cromwell, even more than henry!, can see the succession as an issue of national stability

also when mathieu amalric showed up as chapuys i was like yessss

oh i love him

i guess i'm still not entirely sold on rylance's supercool reading; i always heard the character as being cheerfully unflappable.

funny to dig around on the web/twitter for reactions to this and see comments from catholic conservatives that it's "propaganda". more's been dead nearly 500 years, let it go

lol

for catholics tho 500 years is like the 90's for us

for catholics tho 500 years is like the 90's for us

lol

I'm way into Rylance in this. He's cheerful in his own way. The look on his face after he meets with Henry the first time was perfect. So subtle but the Cromwellian version of jumping into the air, pumping his fist, and saying "YESSSSS."

Just one ep in the US so far, right?

yah

fellas you need to chill: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3027617/Americas-Catholic-bishops-attack-prejudice-laden-Wolf-Hall-BBC-drama-hits-screens.html

I think part of what got to me so hard about Liz and the daughters dying is how Mantel treats Cromwell's ongoing grief in the books. It's always there, quietly, relentlessly. He goes about his business, being 100% Cromwell, and then finds the wings and is hit with the loss all over again. Just knowing that their death is more than a sad scene, I think.

Also I'm a walking stereotype who since having a child cannot cope with seeing children die on TV or in movies.

dvr'd the rerun on thursday, cant wait to see this

the scene where henry gets knocked off the horse is dynamite

yeah it's a corker. rylance spoke about how he was more sympathetic to henry seeing him as being aware of how thin the veneer of peace that came with his rule was and seeing the instant panic and fear erupting immediately is fantastic

watched the first episode of this last night. it's definitely the best thing I watched this week. I'm hooked. makes me want to re-watch a man for all seasons.

also i want to see rylance in everything now.

ep2 was a little slow but it continues to rule

would have been fun to sit in on their classes w/ the hoplology advisor who taught them to shoot

I liked the kitten and the bunny.

i'm kind of bummed they skimmed over a lot of the calais sequence, it's one of my favorite pieces. he meets king francis! he finds that french urchin!

kitty <3

it's weird how no-one looks at all like i pictured yet for the most part they are all so unexpectedly great

love sir thomas moore, and wriothsely looked appropriately twatty

how is rylance so good in this? he's so subtle & excellent

Thank u this thread, reading WH and liking it a lot

aw man they skipped over henry's visit to the house after C gets over his fever. i'm loving this but a lot of the sweet moments and personal stuff is gone.

also it could be faulty memory but anne is coming off way worse than on the page.

poor joan :(

yeah they def miss all the gorgeous detail...100% broadstrokes this

Yeah, I think I'd be way more into this if I hadn't read the books. OTOH, Rylance is perfect.

JUst found a copy of the 2nd book reasonably cheap in a charity shop. haven't read the first but have watched the tv series. So wondering if I'm missing anything by starting in the wrong place chronologically. But bet I'm not the first to do so.
Surprised to see that on the shelves when I was looking since this close after the series was shown I would think it would be snapped up almost instantly. maybe I did . Don't know when that went out. but it wasn't the series tie in version so maybe people didn't see it.

series was good and enjoyable (haven't watched the final ep yet) but felt almost like a ghost of the world of the books

you might not exactly miss anything of the sense of chronology Stevelende but you'll miss a whole book of words and in the end I think it's all about the words

words v important. one of my favourite things about the second book that won't resonate so much without reading the first is the 'left leg' etc bits.

you gotta read the first book. as good as it is, tv broad strokes barely scratch the surface of the book's richness

THing is I probably will read the first book at some point. it's just so happened that the 2nd book has appeared before i found a cheap copy of the 1st so my opportunity to read it is coming first. Subsequently wondering if I did need to wait and try to get to read the first one first or just go ahead with the 2nd one.
Was thinking that everything I needed to know would probably be explained in the book since with it having been a popular book it has to have been expected that a significant part of the audience would not have read the first one first.

& that what ever plot development i was missing by not having read it first would have probably also been covered to some extent in the tv series. But I do know that they are different media with different focuses for the story. Book is apparently a lot more internal to Cromwell. Will find out when I go to read it. But do have a couple of things to finish first.
Chance is open taht in the interim I might just score a copy of Wolf Hall before I start Bodies anyway.

LISTEN TO ME

READ THE FIRST BOOK FIRST

you must listen to vg, stevolende, she has not said a false word in this whole thread. it was her posts that finally got me reading these books and i am so grateful.

plot's good but with wanting not to be evangelical or didactic plot's a bit secondary like

agreed

no they're really not about plot at all but the first book establishes so much more otherwise. couldn't imagine starting with BUTB, seems like a terrible idea.

Definitely read the first book first.

Virtually all the plot is in the real history anyway. It's about character really.

Right, do have a number of other books to read anyway, just happened to pick the 2nd book up. Maybe I can get the first one from a library before that or keep my fingers crossed for a cheap copy to appear.

Anyway have the 2nd book and being told to wait before reading it just means its going to be backburnered.

But everything is a question of chance anyway in terms of what does turn up. Did think that maybe a number of things that would make reading the 2 books in the wrong order in isolation from the tv series odd might be somewhat different once I had seen the tv series.
Which I have but people are saying stick to chronological order.

Really it is just a book that I have picked up cheap in a charity shop and I doubt I would have been the first person to read those the other way round. Sure some people have gone back to the first book after enjoying the 2nd. Happens with a lot of series I think.

JUst hope that backburnering doesn't become permanent and the book remain unread.

patience grasshopper

the exchanges between Moore & Cromwell as things ratchet up in the show are starting to get v close to the electricity conveyed in the book

there are times when it feels like a look from Cromwell could set Moore alight

u+k:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/30/wolf-hall-codpieces-too-small-says-literature-researcher

I borrowed Niccolo Rising from the library, saw it recommended upthread

Love her writing style, can see some distant Mantel/Wolf Hall similarities even early on

interesting, historically-critical take of the series/book (and summary of others)

http://unireadinghistory.com/2015/02/12/a-historical-perspective-on-wolf-hall-thomas-cromwell-and-thomas-more-revisited/

though i do feel like a lot of these pro-more type of crits really overestimate how "good" cromwell is in this thing. i mean, you like him. but so what?

the series does place more at a scene of torture, which i don't think the book did, explicitly?

i'm pretty sure the book did also

more has enough cheerleaders, the catholics made him a saint ffs. he's FINE

i mean, I get why historians might get their panties wadded over Wolf Hall but imo it's fiction & dont be such predictable buzzkills and you have to admit it's fun to see Ole Saint Utopia portrayed in a less flattering light

think the writer of that piece is solely going off the tv show which HELLO... even if it does link to critiques of the book, it still annoys me when ppl go off halfcocked like that

Well found a €1 copy of the 1st book today, just after reserving it through a library.
So got that to look forward to.

eh i wasn't into the last ep. this whole thing was just too brief; the sense of many long disparate threads being tied off and cut with anne's execution was indicated but not really felt. the horror-movie ending shot was ok but the execution itself wasn't nearly guignol enough imo.

missed thomas wyatt too

just noticed wolf hall now on netflix uk -- i imagine i will binge-rewatch, starting in a few minutes

read both the books in no time flat as relaxation for organising my rock-write conference last year, having watched the series in real time on TV

(lol i watched A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS a few days ago: it is dreadful old rubbish by comparison)

wolsey is orson welles in make-up that looks like brown wax thrown at his face, he's p much the best thing in it

thomas more's bunny

thomas more's hipster glasses

Hoping there is a 2nd series coming at some point, but it might rely on Mantel finishing writing up to More's death.

dude more's long dead, you mean cromwell maybe

Yeah, typed that wrong.

there's a line i always misremember, about more's marriage: it's better to marry than to burn, but to be on the safe side, he had a wife he hated, or something like that

Wound up getting both of the books and enjoying the prose greatly. But got sidetracked into several other books before finishing them.
Also got the thing she did on the French Revolution

<3<3 the bunny <3<3

there are many things wrong with A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS but no bunny is the worst

anne boleyn (meaning claire foy) startlingly resembles my mum's best friend of many years, in look and mannerism and expression -- so much so i wonder if they're actually cousins or something (not sure how to find out, where my mum's friend now lives or even if she still lives)

trying (in retrospect) to think of a better* henry than damian lewis:

charles laughton (1933, the private life of…) : love love love CL but this is old school panto "bluff king hal was full of beans" stuff
robert shaw (1966, man for all seasons): good-ish in a bad film
richard burton 1969, (anne of the thousand days): burton is good in "the spy who came in from the cold", but in nearly everything else, so hopes not high
keith michell (1970, six wives of …) : famous prestige BBC series full of actors better known for other things (eg dr who), KM mainly underwhelming (sad to see RIP last november, at 89)
sid james (1971, carry on …) : actually the best ever obv yes
charlton heston (1977, the prince and the pauper): haven't seen this since i was a kid, heston is heston
ray winstone (2003, henry viii): lol
eric bana (2008, "the other boleyn girl"): LOL
jonathan rhys myers (2010, the tudors): LOOOOOOL

*= a vain, greedy, handsome brony full of self-pity and petulant self-justification, not a fool exactly -- he surrounded himself with smart** people and (as tudors always must) fended off the barons effectively enough -- but not in any sense wise: if his latent intelligence could be appealed to (which is why he was drawn to more and wolsey and cromwell and boleyn in the first place), you had always to travel via his self-admiration and appetites… i think robert shaw does get some of this, but can't get to enough of it in context

**who mostly hated one another other

(did ppl mainly hate the idea of lewis bcz of homeland? i have literally never watch a single ep of homeland so i guess i am immune to its effects)

He is pretty decent in WH and is generally a decent actor, but I feel like he draws a lot of hate in general for being part of the currently omnipresent posh actor cru and does seem a bit of a dick irl.

this was my favourite "posh actor cru" moment in WH: hapless harry percy IS
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/976x549_b/p020hgrw.jpg

charles laughton (1933, the private life of…) : love love love CL but this is old school panto "bluff king hal was full of beans" stuff
robert shaw (1966, man for all seasons): good-ish in a bad film

33 years with no onscreen Henry 8?

oops i meant also to append the imdb complete list: http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0459965/

ans = 1935-60 was a p thin time for hals! and half of the ones that actually happened during that time were played by laughton

Lauderdale Maitland > Charles Laughton

Some strange ones in there, somehow I cannot see T.P. McKenna as Henry VIII.

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BNTgwMTE2NzQ1M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNDM0NDYwMTE@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,708,1000_AL_.jpg

square face tick, sandy hair tick, big voice tick

lauderdale maitland, centre, THE KILL (1921, a stageplay):
http://c8.alamy.com/comp/B4WCAH/the-kill-starring-actor-russell-thorndike-lauderdale-maitland-and-B4WCAH.jpg

amazing beard TICK, kingly stance TICK

withdrawal symptoms: started re-watching "the tudors" on netflix

Is the rest of her stuff as good as the 2 Cromwell books?
Found a few in charity shops but not read more than about 2/3rds of Wolf Hall which I need to get back to and finish.
Prose really is pretty tasty.

I made it 1.5 episodes into the Tudors and had to stop, it made me miss Wolf Hall too much

it takes a somewhat different approach it is true

i like jonathan rhys myers tho

There's a good Elizabeth I with Vanessa Redgrave that I watched a couple of years back.
I think it had a related Henry VIII series at the time it came out but I haven't seen that.
But it's 30 or 40 years old.

I found Rossellini's french tv movie The Taking Of Power by Louis XIV very good stuff, no real stand out performances but brilliantly staged. it might be useful to those that liked WH.

the henry viii series was "the six wives of henry viii" with keith michell as henry (and tons of v famous brit tv actors) -- big deal at the time (we watched it as a family) but probably looks a bit creaky now

(michell died last year aged 89, which made me sad even tho i don't think i ever thought abt him or saw him in any other context)

Is the rest of her stuff as good as the 2 Cromwell books?

A Slice of Greater Pastry doesn't quite spark off the page like WH but is just as dramatic and convincing.

special foodie version yeah?

omg the tudors is taking its time removing more's head

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/hilary-mantel-says-final-wolf-hall-book-unlikely-to-come-out-in-2018-as-planned

booooooo

the mirror and the light vs winds of winter betting pool?

give me the mirror and the light and give it me now

reread this thread and realised when i said i skim-read the first two to destress while prepping for my conference BOY was i skim-reading -- just like huge amounts only grapsed at second reading, of story as well as approach

someone above (goole?) sez "ppl are over-estimating how good crom is in the books" and i think this is right -- you are enormously artfully drawn into his version of the story, his justifications, his perspective, his innovations and reworkings of the kingdom into somewhere everyone (inc.the poor!) cd be peaceful and prosperous in… but the ruthlessness of what he's doing is right there in front of you, inc. (in particular) all the beheaded, and the v long game leading to the beheadings. basically anne b is framed so he can revenge himself on mark smeaton for saying he looks like a murderer! i mean yes, almost all the beheaded are terrible ppl -- and almost all his transformations of the structure were good not bad. in the sense that capitalism is arguably better for more ppl than feudalism, and the cromwell-2-cromwell management of the Arrival of the Book was in fact less bloody and awful (a bit less) than the 30 yrs war.

anyway the moral is that cromwell is capitalism and he is able (in two books deliberately fashioned to lens us into his perspective) to give an excellent account of himself for this and other reasons, but all around is shadows and grim horror all the same. he loathes lots of it but he also creates lots of it.

and the conclusion is that these books are THE BEST and the tv show is also but in a different (much more melancholic) way

my mum, a reader but not heavily literary, finished this and then immediately read it from cover to cover again (this before Bring Up the Bodies). not sure what that means but i know she would concur, mark! (she also made the point to me about Cromwell not being good as such, but how effectively you are drawn into his world). I still haven’t read Bring up the Bodies or i think properly finished Wolf Hall.

i wd definitely say you haven't properly finished it until you've reread it at least once, there's a LOT of anticipation and callback going on

(caveat: i am generally still a very skippy reader first time out, and certainly was here but i had other things on my mind)

Heh, I also reread both very recently, and mark s otm both about the books being THE BEST and Cromwell really not, but very seductive as thoughtful hero. (The grammatical third-person voice which is truly first-person in its view is a shrewd device here I suppose.) Would be interested in seeing the tv eventually, but now probably not before reading the final part.

After I read both for the first time, I naturally went for the French Revolution one; I think it may be the only book where I had the dual experience of a) the reading being a bit of a slog, with me constantly looking at the % remaining on my Kindle, and then b) IMMEDIATELY upon finishing, wanting to start from the top.

Just now read The Giant, O'Brien, which just confirmed that damn she can write. I got maybe some Flann O'Brien vibes; I might perhaps suspect the poor-man-Irishry of being slightly iffy in certain weathers, but I don't really have a quite fine enough English-language palate in my reading ear to say anything useful about that.

I know the prose in Wolf Hall was quite delicious. But still haven't got around to reading any of the other books by her taht i picked up. Did enjoy the TV series, is there more coming.
Also enjoyed Mark Rylance in his theatre performance in that thing about ice fishing.

thought this revive was a release date announcement for cromwell #3, y'all are cruel

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-05-08/wolf-hall-series-2-is-at-least-two-years-away-says-director/

the revive was to demand such an announcement, we'all are pro-active

i get it, we're all on team more mantel

‘A place of greater safety’ is well worth the effort. You can, however, definitely see the lessons Mantel has learnt from that in wolf hall. There protagonists and such a big sweep of time makes for a sweeping epic that gets a bit ramble in places trying to fit everything in. Not a bad book by any means but Wolf Hall’s focus on one man and his internal life within the historical context makes makes for a much better one.

agree

Yeah I would never not recommend it; it seems a very, very good imagination of the period and its situations --

Also, a single scene, where after a court session, the young Robespierre vomits at the side of the road at having to pass his first death sentence, will stay with me a bit.

I found it very moving

just in terms of the sheer work itself, it’s a pretty incredible undertaking

on the one hand symmetry would require me to wait for the third one to come out in paperback, even, but on the other hand I don't think my copies of the first two match all that much even, so whatever

the bbc production of this was not too bad for them

https://i2.wp.com/www.fanfunwithdamianlewis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ep6_2.gif

guess I should read this

It’s probably a con but like any good con artist she makes you feel so good about buying into the con

actually that gif has good reason to be posted for more than the very good purposes of razzing calz :D

the scene in the series -- anne is dead, crom arrives to see the king who is gleeful and opens his arms in a delighted hug of triumph -- isn't in the book: in the book, instead, we see henry serene as he prepares to marry jane, and gloomy as he tell crom he, he henry, may now be too old to have a strong boychild, per something he read in plato (odd source for such wisdom tho i guess in this instance plato will prove correct)

it's a capper on the viewpoint of the series, of course: who is bad here? henry is bad. and this delivery of his desire -- even as it also enacts revenge on a bunch of v awful ppl who crossed crom and mocked cranmer, plus anne who he feels more ambivalent about -- of course puts crom right in the cheery bearhug of the king's badness.

one of the devices at work is bodysize: damien lewis is tall and broad, even if his character is changeable and basically whiny -- here's when he's happy he's also terrifying and horrible. unlike the historical cromwell (per holbein) and the book cromwell (per mantel), mark rylance is no physical bulk to be reckoned with.* rylance plays cromwell wary, watchful, memory-full, when alone melancholy. i think if he dominated more physically and on-screen, we'd likely take against him more. but as i say, the tv show wants the king as villain

the book is more this: while full of lovely things including (sometimes) love, the world is bad and to make it better, we too much if we can also do bad things. the king is less a villain, more a force of nature channelled by duty and fear and possibly medical conditions**, with almost random breakouts into friendship or joy. (he is certain written as kind)

*in the book version of the joust scene and henry seemingly dead, when norfolk comes at cromwell, cromwell simply stand firm and lets the other bounce off him
**reading round to discover what these were i wz delighted to discover there is a school of historian thought that argues he was suffering from SCURVY

In the books: Just as the hero is no hero, no villain is a true villain I think; what seems clearly and consistently bad (in Crom's eyes as harbinger of modernity?) is the blithe institutional acceptance, as necessities, of torture and executions, separate and especially in combination: Cromwell's attendance of a witch burning as a child; "It is true there is a rack at the Tower. No one withstands it. No one."; "the law demands the full traitor's penalty, the short spin in the wind and the conscious public disembowelling, a brazier alight for human entrails. It is the most horrible of all deaths, pain and rage and humiliation swallowed to the dregs, the fear so great that the strongest rebel is unmanned before the executioner with his knife can do the job".

All this while the prose is exquisite.

all these references to crom are making me want a wolf hall / conan the barbarian crossover

dude it already exists:

https://d12swbtw719y4s.cloudfront.net/images/hnZfncc8/ZNJ9p3EQT8n605w7Hw1l/03_Church_and_State_1.jpeg?w=620

ok so i started a place of greater safety last week and it's soooo good. i understand what people are saying upthread about the cromwell series' restriction of perspective helps focus the narrative a bit, but she's just such an engaging writer and so good at drawing all these characters that i'm enjoying the sprawl. even though that sprawl does make me less likely to sit down and read 100 pages at a time.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/22/hilary-mantel-the-mirror-and-the-light-announced-for-2020

Book 3 coming in 2020!

HarperCollins said the novel would offer “a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage”. It also confirmed that the novel would be adapted for television by the BBC, following the Bafta-winning adaptation of Wolf Hall starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell. Peter Straughan will write the adaptation, and Peter Kosminsky will direct. A film exploring the life and work of Mantel herself, from Oxford Films, is also due out next March.

hell yeah

woop

Fantastic news, I’ve just been rereading the first 2.

such good news

eat your heart out George RR Martin

March 2020 for real?

shut up ... srsly?!

:D

Wooo! Just enough time to reread the first 2.

Preordered. US hardcover 784pp, hell yeah

started rereading yesterday in prep. so so good.

Read the extract and interview in this weekend's Graun and am properly excited for the next instalment. Contemplating a re-read...

I didn't realise she lived in Budleigh Salterton. I've been there a fair bit in the last few years and I'm gutted I've not seen her - headscarfed, summoning spirits on a windy headland.

“I do have the sense of it being a very proximate world,” she says. “And sometimes the barrier seems like an enormous stone wall and sometimes it’s just whisper thin. But you can be misunderstood in talking about it. Because none of it can be literal. It’s all just a series of metaphors.”

Also desperate to re-read Beyond Black.

I just finished Bring Up the Bodies. Not saying anything anyone reading this thread doesn't already know but holy shit she is a great writer.

As someone who has read virtually no contemporary fiction, discovering Mantel and Ferrante over the past year has been truly revelatory.

Anyway, my question is: what other 21st century fiction writers are on Mantel's level?

I’m excited for Tuesday.

Anyway, my question is: what other 21st century fiction writers are on Mantel's level?

Peter Carey - try ‘The true history of the Kelly gang’ and ‘A long way from Home’

Thanks! I read Oscar and Lucinda a while back but never dug further.

in terms of literary stature (which is to say lit pages high profile) and skill (which is to say skill but also maybe a bit of scope) i don’t think there’s anyone equal to Mantel. (i wouldn’t personally put carey within a million miles of her)

there are several writers who i like v much out there, and prefer to mantel for my own taste, but they’re doing different things, in a smaller way.

i do find mantel v impressive tho. something slightly alchemical in what she does.

if I read A Place of Greater Safety will I get very weepy about Robespierre

yes

worth it tho, so fkn great & brutal

i have Fludd on my shelf to tide me over before the next one, which I'm trying to hold off on but who am I kidding will probably buy next week.

My preorder has been in since it was dated last year

I think A Place Of Greater Safety might be even better than Wolf Hall. It hits you with these jarring transitions while Mantel leaves out all the standard establishing shots.

I need to read more of her, only read the two Cromwell books, which I loved. "Alchemical" is a good word for her writing. Like a lot of people I've talked to about her, it me a little while to adjust to her, her style is really specific and can be a bit off-putting at first encounter. But it's one of those things that once it clicks, it's magical.

*took* me

the dialogue is so sharp that it can distract from her scene-setting and description, which is also incredible.

my copy is in the mail, let's gooooo

if I read A Place of Greater Safety will I get very weepy about Robespierre

As you should.

I didn't realise she lived in Budleigh Salterton. I've been there a fair bit in the last few years and I'm gutted I've not seen her - headscarfed, summoning spirits on a windy headland.

I stayed a week there on holiday in the mid-90s, still amused whenever I think of the name, so English.

copped today, finishing up WH and bodies again, wolf hall is the best novel of the 21st century so far no joke

when's the paperback out

grateful im not quarantining in the tower

No spoilers but Tom Truth's Love poetry is hilarious.

you know, i reread the first couple of these in a couple days each and i am just dragging in the third

WOW

Just finished

I'm about 2/5 through and I would like to talk about editing. I *think* I'll eventually fall on the side of immersion being everything and who's to say what should and shouldn't be present and the more time I get to spend with this consciousness the better - particularly given, y'know, the end and everything - but I still think it's a conversation to be had. Not that I'd be the one to tell her.

And this is about as tangential as possible, and it might just have been the sun, but reading TMatL today I suddenly got a flashback of Paul Morley's amazing and weird review of Patrick Wolf.

He falls in love with exactly who he wants to fall in love with.
He falls in love. With love, and then what happens, and then who knows.
He falls in.
He falls.
He.

Watch him work, play and etc in a video you might come across. He.

Permits you to watch. He. Studies himself. He. Is assembling himself right in front of you. He. Smashes his way through limited judgements of taste. He. Is detached from everything including detachment. He. Is in rude health. He. Is looking in a mirror. He. Is looking out of a mirror. He. Studies you. He. Is constantly touring. He. Screams lust and heartache into listeners ears. He. May yet shock the masses. He. Has not been brought to your attention by accident.

i am also about two-fifths of the way through and have opinions, most of which are at least tangent to editing

-- were this not an historical novel you'd immediately go 'oh, you have at least two or three clergymen too many .. and does every noble who's angry at cromwell need to have so many nieces?'
-- a lot of this is putting pieces in play that need to be in play later, though (my grasp on this bit of history being wholly nugatory) a lot of this has only become apparent to me after googling. i made a list of the five or six big things that are going to happen, and how norfolk and the church figures and risley are relevant to them, and reading is a little less stressful now that i'm not going 'why do i need to know who latimer is again' every time that name shows up
-- there's a bit too much of people reminding each other of things they'd know. 'my late cardinal and stephen gardiner, who was his secretary at the time, you remember.' that sort of thing.
-- a few too many reveries, memories, etc in general
-- the first half of wolf hall, where these are a structural device to get through a lack of chronological momentum, works better than the rest of the trilogy (unless it suddenly reaches a new height in the back half of this one.) it felt like it had the benefit of a lot of revision, reworking, thought; the rest of it feels a bit written in public, sometimes the castings back to events of previous volumes do feel like they're grasping for something no longer in the author's reach or remit since published.

Jane Seymour’s personality a bit of a casualty to the latter process

Yes to most of that - albeit filleting out the 'nieces problem' would take away half of Mantel's fun. (I rambled on somewhere else that she's essentially a misanthrope but also an insatiable gossip - that and her belief in the proximal nature of the spirit world are what drive her as a novelist.) I think the overall issue is momentum: as the books have progressed, the horizon of possibility inevitably shrinks and so the narrative loses its verticality and becomes literally more horizontal. When it was kicking off with the papists in the north, I thought 'finally, some action!' but even this mostly happened off-stage.

I am still thoroughly enjoying myself, though.

she’s not interested in battles, she skipped them entirely in place of greater safety

I'm not particularly interested either - it was more a comment on the narrative needing some room to breathe (while being hyper-aware that claustrophobia/immersion is part of the fabric of the series).

I did enjoy, in Greater Safety, that when Danton goes out of Paris on mission he’s just absent from the narrative. or during the .. i forget what it’s called, the night of the seizing of the Tuileries ... the narrative is shut up in a bedroom while people go out and fight on the streets

When it was kicking off with the papists in the north, I thought 'finally, some action!' but even this mostly happened off-stage.

i made a list of six things that had to happen in this book before cromwell’s seizure and execution. the first one was the revolt in the north. the second happened in the following section. at page 569, finally, the third thing is happening. three things, now, have happened.

I did enjoy, in Greater Safety, that when Danton goes out of Paris on mission he’s just absent from the narrative. or during the .. i forget what it’s called, the night of the seizing of the Tuileries ... the narrative is shut up in a bedroom while people go out and fight on the streets

When it was kicking off with the papists in the north, I thought 'finally, some action!' but even this mostly happened off-stage.

i made a list of six things that had to happen in this book before cromwell’s seizure and execution. the first one was the revolt in the north. the second happened in the following section. at page 569, finally, the third thing is happening. three things, now, have happened.

wish i had this on kindle so i could more easily annotate all the mirrors and lights that show up without diminishing the resale value. it would also have been easier to carry on the plane

the title phrase shows up in Cromwell flattering Henry (“the mirror and the light of all other princes”, which I’m sure I’ve heard before, but where) (I was surprised to find out that Mantel didn’t invent Danton’s last words, they seemed so entirely of the version of the character she drew: I guess she started from there and worked backward.)

but the words have shown up in many places before, paired and unpaired. later Cromwell goes riding with his son,

the sun a perfect crimson orb above the line of the downs. The sky has become a mirror, against which the sun moves: light without shadow, like the light at the beginning of the world.

-- the visions of the english countryside, often in the imaginations of the characters rather than the diegesis of the novel, a key counterweight to the unremitting claustrophobia
-- the equation of henry's physical body with that of his body as king with that of his country
-- how this fits in with the recurring lollard / lutheran / anglican reassessment of the sacrament, the idea of christ's body in the mass; miirc the catholic answer to 'why doesn't the host taste like human flesh, then' is something like: why do you think your phenomenal perception of the world has any bearing on what the host might be in the noumenal world?

thomas cromwell's double bind in the books is that in trying to intil an anti-transcendental faith in england he gets caught up more and more in a transcendetal idea of kingship, perhaps. i'm not sure how i feel about this, it feels a bit of a glib reduction.

(one note i wish i'd taken: when cromwell thinks of st. paul's letter to the corinthians, does he use the word 'mirror'? or 'glass', as in tyndale?)

Oh, it's the end of 3.1, leading up to:

Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.

I believe I have caught Mantel in an error, ahem, or she's just using the more familiar version because why not: "through a glass darkly," Cromwell thinks, but this post-dates him; in Tyndale it's "in a glass, even in a dark speaking". Yes, I did look that up.

I think that BBC4 are repeating the TV WOLF HALL soon.

I have finished. I need to let it settle.

I am glad to be free of Hilary's clutches.

Until you read them all over again in a blur some fine summer week

i don’t know ultimately how much of this needed to exist. how much what turns into a blow by blow account could make sense of a career wrecked in the end almost by happenstance. that said the last section, predictably, wrecked me

and so much ringing the changes on the same organising metaphors: mirrors; lights; books; cats--perhaps Mantel is playing the same kind of game as Javier Marias or, on a very different level, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Or perhaps it's just lazy! I'm honestly not sure.

When the light goes out, so to speak, it's heartbreaking, particularly in the light of the last epigram attached to the text, and the bit of Wyatt serving as an alternative to it, in the last couple of pages.

Anyway. Here's some books and a mirror:

Her visit marks her place in the book of his life -- a book which falls back into loose leaves. Printers can read as if through a mirror. It is their trade. Their fingers are nimble and their eye keen. But examine any book and you will see that some characters are upside down, some transposed.

Later, Cromwell is looking at a history in which the dates for events before Christ's birth are printed, deliberately, upside-down.

And somewhat later, but before everything collapses:

Can you make a new England? You can write a new story. You can write new texts and destroy the old ones, set the torn leaves of Duns Scotus sailing about the quadrangles, and place the gospels in every church. You can write on England, but what was written before keeps showing through, inscribed on the rocks and carried on floodwater, surfacing from the deep cold wells. It's not just the saints and martyrs who claim the country, it's those who came before them: the dwarves dug into ditches, the sprites who sing on the breeze, the demons bricked into culverts and buried under bridges; the bones under your floor. You cannot tax them or count them. They have lasted ten thousand years and ten thousand before that. They are not easily dispossessed by farmers with fresh leases and law clerks who adduce proof of title. They bubble out of the ground, wear away the shoreline, sow weeds among the crops and erode the workings of mines.

And later:

The king wonders aloud, what shall we do when knights of the Garter are found to be traitors--men like Nicholas Carew? Certainly their names should be stricken from the volumes that contain the history of the order. But will that not mar the beauty of the pages?

The decision is that the disgraced name should remain. But the words 'VAH! PRODITUR' should be written in the margin, so the man is branded for ever.

The end very much wrecked me, too - proper heaving sobs. I'm a sentimental fucker and these are tough times but still.

Agreed on the metaphors. I feel like I'm missing something with the cat in the tree and the leopard.

Also, give me five minutes in a room with Gardiner. Just five.

i tried to watch the series and i couldn't get over my immediate conception that the director had 'the thick of it' in the back of their head throughout

got M&L for wobs as requested, already 74 pages in lol (turned bedside reading light off at 3)

i: love love love being back in this world, a matter of HM's tone and flow as much as the actual story i think (since i find it calming despite the matter being distressing) (sometimes i have trhe show on in the background while i read bcz its music now has the same effect)
ii: not rereading the thread yet -- the main upcoming events of course arrive some 600 yrs pre-spoilered obv but still i want to toy with it all at my own speed as it arrive
iii: already i've run across several speech-things that book-cromwell has in his armoury that i now hear entirely in a rylance-cadence (so it's entertaining when TC self-describes and it's the holbein-depicted body, squat and bulky, not MR'S = small and slight)
iv: noting production-wise that some material in the show so far is from *this* book early on not the last one: i'm guessing HR isn't copying from script to future book GRRMartin-style so the TV ppl presumably had sight of versions of M&L long pre-pub? (i mean i know it;s based on a historical tale but these are micro-details not in the history books)

entirely predictably i am reading them all from the beginning again (3/4s thru WH again, once again picking up a lot that i missed, so much is foreshadowed from the start)

confusing to spot jane seymour in the episode of peaky blinders i watched on wed

re-read of wolf hall itself nearly complete

this is my third time through it and it's actively to me curious how different it feels this time (i think i noterd above that my very first read was largely a stress-distraction read… but the second wasn't!)

for example how much of TC's stream of consciousness is subtly horny fascination with women who end up other ppl's wives lol (jane seymour and mary boleyn the most obvious, but the lowborn viz rafe's future wife also, ellen or helen barre, and two or maybe even three others of less note) (ie i dont remember their names)

plus the penumbra of gossip set around this fact -- which is arguably one of the things that eventually undoes him (his supposed eye on princess mary, or hers on him). builds up also to the funny confusion-plotline abt the woman who becomes gregory's wife = jane seymour's sister (who for a couple of pages in tM&tL belives TC is proposing to her)

plenty of nudging already at mirrors and lights, especially the latter -- have to assume this had already formed in HM's head as a shaping metaphor (not that i quite understand it) -- plus also the curious vehemence whenever the jester sexton aka patch is on-stage, cromwell HAAAAAATES him lol, and keeps bumrushing him angrily (and then like half a book later patch is back and TC is saying "what the hell is HE doing here?")

(this hatred is explicable in story-terms, in that patch once work for for wolsey and chose to mock his former employer once he was part of the king's staff, but it's also very extra and in no sense plot-driving: i'm going to argue that the low-born patch who is allowed to say anything acts as a MIRROR for cromwell, throwing unwanted LIGHT on his own self-disgust blah blah… )

finally reading The Mirror & The Light
srsly, just inject this prose into my veins i love it it makes me feel slightly giddy & dreamy.
is that weird?

still wild to me that she can make me feel remotely sympathetic towards Mary or even fkn Henry at times, such is the power of fiction

also the FOOD and TEXTILES in this series my god

(i just finished rereading tM&tL and have a low-key query: has it anywhere been discussed -- or has HM talked abt -- that she plainly devoured thomas harris at some point and certain very identifiable bits re-emerge = wound man, a version of the memory palace, plus also some less easily identifiable moves and tropes now and then)

the notion that TC is in reality the hannibal of the tudors is quite funny to me

i googled this and found a review of "bring up the bodies" which explicitly argues that her love of the historically horrible thomas cromwell is exactly like our love of the finctionaly evil hannibal lecter -- and it was in the evening standard so she very likely also saw it, and (in my theory) went off to read hannibal and clearly liked some of what she read

(i actually think the ES review is dumb but that's not really the point here)

Heh, confounded TC and ES into EC and thought I was back onto another Elvis Costello thread.

Surely somewhere in his enormous corpus he has mentioned Cromwell and/or Lecter at least once perhaps in one of his party/list songs.

a version of the memory palace

This is not exclusive to harris, cf. john crowley's 'little, big' and the aegypt books where it gets traced back to Giordano Bruno, he and it have also cropped up in other things I've read recently that I can't recall (oh the irony). Harris I daresay the most famous though.

Pretty sure it's from Cicero

I started WH some weeks ago and have read two books in between since. I need some headspace, I think.

it's not exclusive to harris no -- i learnt it as "kim's game" from my dad when i was little, so named bcz there's a v basic version in kipling's kim -- but the idea that it's viscerally pertinent to the building of character is more how i responded here (in kim it's just a handy technique that a spy can deploy)

Mantel's prose style is what turns me off reading these; I've tried many times. It's frustrating! People seem to really enjoy them but I must grudgingly say it is Not For Me. I find myself unable to sink into the story because the sentences draw so much attention to themselves. Feature not bug, perhaps?

I find her a great writer.

(i just started a place of greater safety., meeting robespierre etc as children, camille desmoulin is a cheeky sod in this reading)

Greater Safety is beautiful

xposts

to be fair, it did take me a while to start Mirror & the Light — every time I picked it up it felt too dense for what my brain could handle at the time

but I had recently been watching stuff about Mary 1 and other Tudory things & that helped get me in the right frame of kind

so i do understand if it feels like its too much

*mind