Britannia Radio

Wolf Hall

SUNDAY, 10TH JANUARY 2010

 

I have just finished reading Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning novel, Wolf Hall. It is simply stunning. I can scarcely remember a novel which has consumed me so utterly by creating a totally believable world. What did I know about Thomas Cromwell before I read it? Nothing that I could remember of any great significance. Now I feel I know him and understand him. How much of this wonderful novel is historical fact and how much derives from the imagination of Hilary Mantel I cannot say; but her book creates the impression of real people saying real things and feeling all-too real agonies, both corporeal and spiritual, in a political and religious climate of unimaginable fanatical savagery.

Two things stand out for me in particular, apart from the extraordinarily subtle, sensitive and sympathetic portrait painted of Cromwell himself and his steady trajectory to supreme power as Henry Vlll’s indispensable aide and ally in employing unspeakable means to realise Henry’s obsessional and despotic quest for a male heir -- all through Cromwell’s combination of ruthless power, intellectual force, the steadiest of judgment and a character of pure steel forged by adversity.   

The first is the eye-opening picture Mantel paints of Sir Thomas More, here transformed from a martyred man of iron principle into a cold, ruthless hypocrite guilty of appalling cynicism, savagery and personal treachery.

The second is the stomach-turning depictions of the terror perpetrated against heretics -- whether their purported crimes were for Luther or the Pope or against the supreme authority of Henry himself -- and the barbarity of the mobs who gathered to view and exult in the burnings and the disembowellings. 

Although today we can see all too clearly within the Islamic world such fanaticism and the use of religion to service political tyranny, such pathological savagery is surely now unthinkable in the west... except that we know it is not. As we saw from the atrocities of the last century, western modernity did not manufacture human nature anew. Civilisation is only the thinnest of veneers. Mantel may be writing about 16^th century England, but the deepest emotions that galvanise individuals to commit terrible deeds – fear, vanity, cruelty, resentment, hatred, paranoia – not to mention the supreme courage of those who resist, speak to us all today, and for all time.

Unputdownable.