itt WOLF HALL the book by hilary mantel and the upcoming hbo/bbc miniseries based on the same

March 2020 for real?

shut up ... srsly?!

:D

Wooo! Just enough time to reread the first 2.

Preordered. US hardcover 784pp, hell yeah

started rereading yesterday in prep. so so good.

Read the extract and interview in this weekend's Graun and am properly excited for the next instalment. Contemplating a re-read...

I didn't realise she lived in Budleigh Salterton. I've been there a fair bit in the last few years and I'm gutted I've not seen her - headscarfed, summoning spirits on a windy headland.

“I do have the sense of it being a very proximate world,” she says. “And sometimes the barrier seems like an enormous stone wall and sometimes it’s just whisper thin. But you can be misunderstood in talking about it. Because none of it can be literal. It’s all just a series of metaphors.”

Also desperate to re-read Beyond Black.

I just finished Bring Up the Bodies. Not saying anything anyone reading this thread doesn't already know but holy shit she is a great writer.

As someone who has read virtually no contemporary fiction, discovering Mantel and Ferrante over the past year has been truly revelatory.

Anyway, my question is: what other 21st century fiction writers are on Mantel's level?

I’m excited for Tuesday.

Anyway, my question is: what other 21st century fiction writers are on Mantel's level?

Peter Carey - try ‘The true history of the Kelly gang’ and ‘A long way from Home’

Thanks! I read Oscar and Lucinda a while back but never dug further.

in terms of literary stature (which is to say lit pages high profile) and skill (which is to say skill but also maybe a bit of scope) i don’t think there’s anyone equal to Mantel. (i wouldn’t personally put carey within a million miles of her)

there are several writers who i like v much out there, and prefer to mantel for my own taste, but they’re doing different things, in a smaller way.

i do find mantel v impressive tho. something slightly alchemical in what she does.

if I read A Place of Greater Safety will I get very weepy about Robespierre

yes

worth it tho, so fkn great & brutal

i have Fludd on my shelf to tide me over before the next one, which I'm trying to hold off on but who am I kidding will probably buy next week.

My preorder has been in since it was dated last year

I think A Place Of Greater Safety might be even better than Wolf Hall. It hits you with these jarring transitions while Mantel leaves out all the standard establishing shots.

I need to read more of her, only read the two Cromwell books, which I loved. "Alchemical" is a good word for her writing. Like a lot of people I've talked to about her, it me a little while to adjust to her, her style is really specific and can be a bit off-putting at first encounter. But it's one of those things that once it clicks, it's magical.

*took* me

the dialogue is so sharp that it can distract from her scene-setting and description, which is also incredible.

my copy is in the mail, let's gooooo

if I read A Place of Greater Safety will I get very weepy about Robespierre

As you should.

I didn't realise she lived in Budleigh Salterton. I've been there a fair bit in the last few years and I'm gutted I've not seen her - headscarfed, summoning spirits on a windy headland.

I stayed a week there on holiday in the mid-90s, still amused whenever I think of the name, so English.

copped today, finishing up WH and bodies again, wolf hall is the best novel of the 21st century so far no joke

when's the paperback out

grateful im not quarantining in the tower

No spoilers but Tom Truth's Love poetry is hilarious.

you know, i reread the first couple of these in a couple days each and i am just dragging in the third

WOW

Just finished

I'm about 2/5 through and I would like to talk about editing. I *think* I'll eventually fall on the side of immersion being everything and who's to say what should and shouldn't be present and the more time I get to spend with this consciousness the better - particularly given, y'know, the end and everything - but I still think it's a conversation to be had. Not that I'd be the one to tell her.

And this is about as tangential as possible, and it might just have been the sun, but reading TMatL today I suddenly got a flashback of Paul Morley's amazing and weird review of Patrick Wolf.

He falls in love with exactly who he wants to fall in love with.
He falls in love. With love, and then what happens, and then who knows.
He falls in.
He falls.
He.

Watch him work, play and etc in a video you might come across. He.

Permits you to watch. He. Studies himself. He. Is assembling himself right in front of you. He. Smashes his way through limited judgements of taste. He. Is detached from everything including detachment. He. Is in rude health. He. Is looking in a mirror. He. Is looking out of a mirror. He. Studies you. He. Is constantly touring. He. Screams lust and heartache into listeners ears. He. May yet shock the masses. He. Has not been brought to your attention by accident.

i am also about two-fifths of the way through and have opinions, most of which are at least tangent to editing

-- were this not an historical novel you'd immediately go 'oh, you have at least two or three clergymen too many .. and does every noble who's angry at cromwell need to have so many nieces?'
-- a lot of this is putting pieces in play that need to be in play later, though (my grasp on this bit of history being wholly nugatory) a lot of this has only become apparent to me after googling. i made a list of the five or six big things that are going to happen, and how norfolk and the church figures and risley are relevant to them, and reading is a little less stressful now that i'm not going 'why do i need to know who latimer is again' every time that name shows up
-- there's a bit too much of people reminding each other of things they'd know. 'my late cardinal and stephen gardiner, who was his secretary at the time, you remember.' that sort of thing.
-- a few too many reveries, memories, etc in general
-- the first half of wolf hall, where these are a structural device to get through a lack of chronological momentum, works better than the rest of the trilogy (unless it suddenly reaches a new height in the back half of this one.) it felt like it had the benefit of a lot of revision, reworking, thought; the rest of it feels a bit written in public, sometimes the castings back to events of previous volumes do feel like they're grasping for something no longer in the author's reach or remit since published.

Jane Seymour’s personality a bit of a casualty to the latter process

Yes to most of that - albeit filleting out the 'nieces problem' would take away half of Mantel's fun. (I rambled on somewhere else that she's essentially a misanthrope but also an insatiable gossip - that and her belief in the proximal nature of the spirit world are what drive her as a novelist.) I think the overall issue is momentum: as the books have progressed, the horizon of possibility inevitably shrinks and so the narrative loses its verticality and becomes literally more horizontal. When it was kicking off with the papists in the north, I thought 'finally, some action!' but even this mostly happened off-stage.

I am still thoroughly enjoying myself, though.

she’s not interested in battles, she skipped them entirely in place of greater safety

I'm not particularly interested either - it was more a comment on the narrative needing some room to breathe (while being hyper-aware that claustrophobia/immersion is part of the fabric of the series).

I did enjoy, in Greater Safety, that when Danton goes out of Paris on mission he’s just absent from the narrative. or during the .. i forget what it’s called, the night of the seizing of the Tuileries ... the narrative is shut up in a bedroom while people go out and fight on the streets

When it was kicking off with the papists in the north, I thought 'finally, some action!' but even this mostly happened off-stage.

i made a list of six things that had to happen in this book before cromwell’s seizure and execution. the first one was the revolt in the north. the second happened in the following section. at page 569, finally, the third thing is happening. three things, now, have happened.

I did enjoy, in Greater Safety, that when Danton goes out of Paris on mission he’s just absent from the narrative. or during the .. i forget what it’s called, the night of the seizing of the Tuileries ... the narrative is shut up in a bedroom while people go out and fight on the streets

When it was kicking off with the papists in the north, I thought 'finally, some action!' but even this mostly happened off-stage.

i made a list of six things that had to happen in this book before cromwell’s seizure and execution. the first one was the revolt in the north. the second happened in the following section. at page 569, finally, the third thing is happening. three things, now, have happened.

wish i had this on kindle so i could more easily annotate all the mirrors and lights that show up without diminishing the resale value. it would also have been easier to carry on the plane

the title phrase shows up in Cromwell flattering Henry (“the mirror and the light of all other princes”, which I’m sure I’ve heard before, but where) (I was surprised to find out that Mantel didn’t invent Danton’s last words, they seemed so entirely of the version of the character she drew: I guess she started from there and worked backward.)

but the words have shown up in many places before, paired and unpaired. later Cromwell goes riding with his son,

the sun a perfect crimson orb above the line of the downs. The sky has become a mirror, against which the sun moves: light without shadow, like the light at the beginning of the world.

-- the visions of the english countryside, often in the imaginations of the characters rather than the diegesis of the novel, a key counterweight to the unremitting claustrophobia
-- the equation of henry's physical body with that of his body as king with that of his country
-- how this fits in with the recurring lollard / lutheran / anglican reassessment of the sacrament, the idea of christ's body in the mass; miirc the catholic answer to 'why doesn't the host taste like human flesh, then' is something like: why do you think your phenomenal perception of the world has any bearing on what the host might be in the noumenal world?

thomas cromwell's double bind in the books is that in trying to intil an anti-transcendental faith in england he gets caught up more and more in a transcendetal idea of kingship, perhaps. i'm not sure how i feel about this, it feels a bit of a glib reduction.

(one note i wish i'd taken: when cromwell thinks of st. paul's letter to the corinthians, does he use the word 'mirror'? or 'glass', as in tyndale?)

Oh, it's the end of 3.1, leading up to:

Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.

I believe I have caught Mantel in an error, ahem, or she's just using the more familiar version because why not: "through a glass darkly," Cromwell thinks, but this post-dates him; in Tyndale it's "in a glass, even in a dark speaking". Yes, I did look that up.

I think that BBC4 are repeating the TV WOLF HALL soon.

I have finished. I need to let it settle.

I am glad to be free of Hilary's clutches.

Until you read them all over again in a blur some fine summer week

i don’t know ultimately how much of this needed to exist. how much what turns into a blow by blow account could make sense of a career wrecked in the end almost by happenstance. that said the last section, predictably, wrecked me

and so much ringing the changes on the same organising metaphors: mirrors; lights; books; cats--perhaps Mantel is playing the same kind of game as Javier Marias or, on a very different level, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Or perhaps it's just lazy! I'm honestly not sure.

When the light goes out, so to speak, it's heartbreaking, particularly in the light of the last epigram attached to the text, and the bit of Wyatt serving as an alternative to it, in the last couple of pages.

Anyway. Here's some books and a mirror:

Her visit marks her place in the book of his life -- a book which falls back into loose leaves. Printers can read as if through a mirror. It is their trade. Their fingers are nimble and their eye keen. But examine any book and you will see that some characters are upside down, some transposed.

Later, Cromwell is looking at a history in which the dates for events before Christ's birth are printed, deliberately, upside-down.

And somewhat later, but before everything collapses:

Can you make a new England? You can write a new story. You can write new texts and destroy the old ones, set the torn leaves of Duns Scotus sailing about the quadrangles, and place the gospels in every church. You can write on England, but what was written before keeps showing through, inscribed on the rocks and carried on floodwater, surfacing from the deep cold wells. It's not just the saints and martyrs who claim the country, it's those who came before them: the dwarves dug into ditches, the sprites who sing on the breeze, the demons bricked into culverts and buried under bridges; the bones under your floor. You cannot tax them or count them. They have lasted ten thousand years and ten thousand before that. They are not easily dispossessed by farmers with fresh leases and law clerks who adduce proof of title. They bubble out of the ground, wear away the shoreline, sow weeds among the crops and erode the workings of mines.

And later:

The king wonders aloud, what shall we do when knights of the Garter are found to be traitors--men like Nicholas Carew? Certainly their names should be stricken from the volumes that contain the history of the order. But will that not mar the beauty of the pages?

The decision is that the disgraced name should remain. But the words 'VAH! PRODITUR' should be written in the margin, so the man is branded for ever.

The end very much wrecked me, too - proper heaving sobs. I'm a sentimental fucker and these are tough times but still.

Agreed on the metaphors. I feel like I'm missing something with the cat in the tree and the leopard.

Also, give me five minutes in a room with Gardiner. Just five.

i tried to watch the series and i couldn't get over my immediate conception that the director had 'the thick of it' in the back of their head throughout