Reading Wolf Hall

Quick: what’s the best book you’ve read in the last twelve months? The ideal scenario is that into your hands will have fallen on a book of such glittering, all-consuming magnificence as to make the answer easy. It is for me, and although my book-of-the-year was actually published three years ago, the events it describes took place in the fifteen-thirties, so who cares if I’m behind the times? In 2009 the author Hilary Mantel set the historical fiction genre on fire with her novel Wolf Hall, a fictionalized reimagining of life in the reign of King Henry VIII, around the time the king was trying to divorce Catherine of Aragon so he could marry his sirenic and entirely more fertile-looking mistress, Anne Boleyn. When you add the facts that Henry’s failure to produce a male heir would likely tip the country into civil war; that his divorcing the Spanish Catherine would earn the wrath of the far more powerful Spanish crown; and cause the English church to break with the papacy, you have plenty of ingredients for good drama. All of the above is straight from the history books, as is the character that Mantel causes to step onto this stage, Thomas Cromwell. That this son of a Putney blacksmith rose to become the sharpest weapon in the king’s arsenal—the chief architect of Henry’s machinations, who bent parliament to his will and dissolved the English monastic system to consolidate his lord’s power—is well documented. But what the history books do not give us is a clear portrait of Cromwell the man: who he was and what made him so. This is what Mantel does, presenting a fictionalized yet utterly compelling character of such towering intelligence, loyalty, capability, and animating compassion as to make you feel you could reach into the book and grasp his ermine-trimmed robes of state. Not that you’d dare to, since manhandling the most politically powerful man in Tudor England was not the kind of thing the wise did lightly. This novel is a rare beast in historical fiction: one that illuminates a transformational period in history by bringing the thoughts, desires, methods and motivations of its famous players to life with such brilliance, they almost seem like people you might know. Writing about Mantel’s work in The New Yorker, James Wood noted that she “seems to have written a very good modern novel, then changed all her fictional names to English historical figures of the fifteen-twenties and thirties.” The effect makes the sixteenth-century London through which these people move seem as solid and present as the world that surrounds us today.

But don’t take my word for it. My wife, Ashley was introduced to Wolf Hall by my Aunt Sue who, having spent a forty-year career in book publishing, is the best judge of a novel I have ever met. Ashley inhaled all six-hundred-something pages during a three-day period last summer during which to my knowledge she neither spoke, slept, or ate. Getting through it took me a little longer, although I still blame Hilary Mantel for making me miss many significant points of interest during our summer vacation. Neither of us wanted the book to end, and we have foisted our dog-eared copy on anyone who will listen ever since.

Because, despite having given e-books a good college try, Ashley and I still have a thing for the stained, torn, paper-and-ink original article. Beyond the tactile pleasure of having a hefty novel in hand, for me the pleasure derived from the gradual progression through a six-hundred-page paper book still outweighs the ephemeral convenience of its digital counterpart. And the distraction! If the book I’m reading turns into a TV or a photo album or a movie camera or a record collection or a trip to the mall with the click of a button, it’s kind of hard to concentrate on the task at hand. What’s more, there’s just not the same sense of accomplishment in clicking the ‘turn page’ tab six hundred times (why is the text of digital books still presented in pages, anyway?) Don’t get me wrong; I’m very fond of my iPad; use it all the time, and expect that the digitally inclined will be able to choose receiving Country Roads in tablet version very soon. But some things will always be better on paper. For me, the sixteenth century is one of them.

I suppose I’m just getting old. Interestingly though, reading an e-book doesn’t seem to work for our kids either. Both of them love our iPad to distraction and can be bribed to do all kinds of household chores in return for thirty minutes playing Presidents vs Aliens. But when it comes to really reading something, both of them retreat to the paper copies of their favorite books. This flies in the face of everything you hear about the ways kids consume information, and perhaps ours have been living in the country for too long. But I do love to look out on the screen porch and see our seven-year-old engrossed in a tattered copy of Harry Potter, the iPad lying forgotten on the floor beside him.

How about you? If this magazine were available as a digital issue, would you enjoy getting it that way? Seriously: we’d love to know. Find us on Facebook and tell me what you think. While you’re at it, tell me what the best book that you’ve read this year was. I ask because Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s long-awaited sequel to Wolf Hall, has just been released. And true to form, Ashley has gotten hold of it first. So until I can pry it from her fingers, I could use something good to read.

Happy reading, friends.