Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall

One of the things I value highly is thriftiness. Thrift is the reason I read a lot of non-mainstream books: they are the ones on sale. Thrift is also the reason I tend to be a little behind the times on contemporary novels. I certainly know about the books, but I typically wait until a book comes out in paperback. Wolf Hall was a book a desperately wanted to read, and excitedly waited for the paperback edition. When it came out, I used a coupon for a discount at Changing Hands, and I bought it and started reading it. It is always a bad sign when your friends hope you finish a book quickly so that you will stop complaining about it.

Mantel has a way with words: many, many, many words. Perhaps she should have borrowed some of my thrift and put it towards an economy of expression. The wordiness itself was not the only problem, though (keep in mind I am a Dickens girl, and his wordiness has only made me love him more). The wordiness seemed only to be alleviated through the use of pronouns, which actually became problematic. For instance, in a passage with three male characters, it does not help to use the pronoun he consistently throughout the page. I consider myself a savvy reader, and I also consider myself a descriptivist when it comes to language and grammar; however, I struggled so much through certain passages in this book that I spent a great deal of time contemplating and championing the fact that grammar rules exist for a reason. A pronoun is useless if it has an unclear antecedent, and a pronoun is useless if it can possibly refer to three different things in a given context. The he pronoun was such a consistent problem throughout the text that it made the read less enjoyable, and, in case you are doubting me, yes, the issue indeed warranted a discussion of this length. Overall, the book was too dense: too dense with words, pronouns, characters, locations, politics, and loosely explained historical references.

I would not say this is a bad novel, though. After all, Mantel had a lot working against her with a book of this nature: weaving history with imagination, dealing with the preconceptions people bring to the historical figures, and dealing with the excessive amount of people with a role in the historical situations. The character list of this tale would rival even [SPOILER ALERT: another Dickens reference] that of Bleak House. I cannot say I learned much history from this work of historical fiction, but I can say I learned something timeless: sometimes things are not worth the wait, and the less you pay for something often directly equates to less disappointment when something is not what you expect. Thriftiness saved the day here, because if I had shelled out for the hard cover, this review may have had a lot more complaining and a little more snark.

Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009.