“Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son who rose to serve Henry VIII, reorganizes the English state at the cost of his own soul. Booker Prize 2009.”
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Wolf Hall is Hilary Mantel's 2009 novel, the Booker Prize winner and the first volume of her Cromwell trilogy. Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son from Putney who rose to become Henry VIII's principal secretary and the architect of the English Reformation, is the protagonist that most prior Tudor fiction had treated as either villain (in the Catholic-recusant tradition) or functionary (in the Catholic-historian tradition). Mantel writes him as the central consciousness of his era, a brilliant and methodically dangerous man whose Reformation is a working operational project rather than a religious conversion.
Mantel's prose innovation is the unusual present-tense third-person register she develops for Cromwell. The pronoun "he" almost always refers to Cromwell, even in contexts where it would normally refer to whoever was last named. The structural effect is that the reader is inside Cromwell's consciousness more constantly than in any other recent historical novel. The Anne Boleyn rise that the novel tracks (the More trial, the dissolution of the marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the political construction of the coronation) is presented as the operational achievement it was rather than as romantic or theological drama.
Recommended as required historical fiction reading, as one of the canonical literary novels of the twenty-first century (alongside The Road and 2666), and as the right starting point for the trilogy. Five stars without reservation. Read Bring Up the Bodies (2012, our other Mantel review) next. The Mirror & the Light (2020) closes the trilogy. The 2015 BBC adaptation with Mark Rylance is excellent. The Simon Slater audiobook is the definitive audio production.
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