Wolf Hall

‘Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian’s chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes. The basic decision about the book was taken seconds before I began writing. “So now get up”: the person on the ground was Cromwell and the camera was behind his eyes. 

‘The events were happening now, in the present tense, unfolding as I watched, and what followed would be filtered through the main character’s sensibility. He seemed to be occupying the same physical space as me, with a slight ghostly overlap. It didn’t make sense to call him “Cromwell”, as if he were somewhere across the room. I called him “he”. This device, though hardly of Joycean complexity, was not universally popular. Most readers caught on quickly. Those who didn’t, complained.’

‘We have a book which, as a piece of creative fiction, is extraordinary in its technique, its confidence. Once you are in to it, you are in to it – you don’t stop.’

Janet Maslin, The New York Times

‘Ms. Mantel takes an extremely contemporary approach to Cromwell by appreciating his toughness, his keen political instincts, his financial acumen and his intimate knowledge of the workings of power. Almost unimaginable, in the midst of Henry’s impetuousness, Anne’s ambition and More’s self-righteous condescension, Cromwell emerges as the most sympathetic member of the wolf pack that populates Wolf Hall […] Her book’s main characters are scorchingly well rendered. And their sharp-clawed machinations are presented with nonstop verve in a book that can compress a wealth of incisiveness into a very few well-chosen words.’

Stephen Greenblatt, The New York Review of Books

‘Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a startling achievement, a brilliant historical novel focused on the rise to power of a figure exceedingly unlikely, on the face of things, to arouse any sympathy at all […] Cromwell’s actual life story is, in its way, a somberly fascinating one. But it is not the story that Hilary Mantel has chosen to relate. The Cromwell of Wolf Hall has some of the qualities that his enemies feared and detested—toughness, wiliness, worldliness—but as Mantel depicts them, they are qualities in the service of survival, success, and even a measure of decency in a cruel and indecent world.’

Wendy Smith, The Washington Post

‘Hilary Mantel has created a novel both fresh and finely wrought: a brilliant portrait of a society in the throes of disorienting change, anchored by a penetrating character study of Henry’s formidable advisor, Thomas Cromwell.’

Colin Burrow, The London Review of Books

‘Mantel’s ability to pick out vivid scenes from sources and give them life within her fiction is quite exceptional […] Repeatedly, Wolf Hall suggests that no one, apart possibly from Cromwell, can really know what will turn out to be important. Its chief running joke is that people and things which come to be of immense historical significance are within the novel unobserved and peripheral.’

Ross King, The Los Angeles Times

‘Mantel’s version of these events is far more subtle and intricate than anything imagined by the writers of The Tudors. She is at her best when turning her penetrating novelistic gaze to history […] Mantel’s abilities to channel the life and lexicon of the past are nothing short of astonishing. She burrows down through the historical record to uncover the tiniest, most telling details, evoking the minutiae of history as vividly as its grand sweep. The dialogue is so convincing that she seems to have been, in another life, a stenographer taking notes in the taverns and palaces of Tudor England.’

‘In early 2008, a few days before I was boarding a plane to Australia, Hilary emailed to say she thought she had a novel finished and would I read it. A novel, she said, but not the novel: by now there were many hundreds of pages but Thomas More had only just met his end. Hilary felt that what she now had was a part of the story that was complete in itself, with an architecture all its own. The rest of Cromwell’s story could come in a subsequent book. 

‘I read the manuscript on that long plane journey, England receding hour by hour over my shoulder but on the page coming sharply into focus. Wolf Hall pulled together many of the preoccupations of Hilary’s earlier novels, but now harnessed expansively in the service of the great founding story of the modern state. There was no historical fiction I knew of remotely like it.’

Wolf Hall was adapted into a six-part miniseries for the BBC, starring Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII, in 2015. 

The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum, reviewing Wolf Hall, said ‘the show’s deliberately paced six hours turn out to be riveting, precisely because they are committed, without apology or, often, much explanation, to the esotericism of their subject matter’, while the Guardian’s Sam Wollaston called it ‘event television, sumptuous, intelligent and serious, meticulous in the detail, but not humourless or po-faced’.

Among the awards the show won was Best Drama Series and Best Actor for Rylance at the 2016 BAFTA TV Awards and the 2016 Golden Globe for Best Miniseries or Television Film.

Watch Wolf Hall on Amazon Prime here

Wolf Hall was the first of two Booker Prize wins for Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy.

In her 2009 acceptance speech for her Wolf Hall win, Mantel shared that she had the book in mind for a long time before starting to write it.

‘I hesitated for such a long time before beginning to write this book, actually for about 20 years,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t begin until I felt secure enough to say to my publisher just what a publisher always wants to hear “this will take me several years,  you know”. But they took it on the chin. 

‘When I began the book I knew I had to do something very difficult: I had to interest the historians, I had to amuse the jaded palette of the critical establishment and most of all I had to capture the imagination of the general reader.’