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

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

got M&L for wobs as requested, already 74 pages in lol (turned bedside reading light off at 3)

i: love love love being back in this world, a matter of HM's tone and flow as much as the actual story i think (since i find it calming despite the matter being distressing) (sometimes i have trhe show on in the background while i read bcz its music now has the same effect)
ii: not rereading the thread yet -- the main upcoming events of course arrive some 600 yrs pre-spoilered obv but still i want to toy with it all at my own speed as it arrive
iii: already i've run across several speech-things that book-cromwell has in his armoury that i now hear entirely in a rylance-cadence (so it's entertaining when TC self-describes and it's the holbein-depicted body, squat and bulky, not MR'S = small and slight)
iv: noting production-wise that some material in the show so far is from *this* book early on not the last one: i'm guessing HR isn't copying from script to future book GRRMartin-style so the TV ppl presumably had sight of versions of M&L long pre-pub? (i mean i know it;s based on a historical tale but these are micro-details not in the history books)

entirely predictably i am reading them all from the beginning again (3/4s thru WH again, once again picking up a lot that i missed, so much is foreshadowed from the start)

confusing to spot jane seymour in the episode of peaky blinders i watched on wed

re-read of wolf hall itself nearly complete

this is my third time through it and it's actively to me curious how different it feels this time (i think i noterd above that my very first read was largely a stress-distraction read… but the second wasn't!)

for example how much of TC's stream of consciousness is subtly horny fascination with women who end up other ppl's wives lol (jane seymour and mary boleyn the most obvious, but the lowborn viz rafe's future wife also, ellen or helen barre, and two or maybe even three others of less note) (ie i dont remember their names)

plus the penumbra of gossip set around this fact -- which is arguably one of the things that eventually undoes him (his supposed eye on princess mary, or hers on him). builds up also to the funny confusion-plotline abt the woman who becomes gregory's wife = jane seymour's sister (who for a couple of pages in tM&tL belives TC is proposing to her)

plenty of nudging already at mirrors and lights, especially the latter -- have to assume this had already formed in HM's head as a shaping metaphor (not that i quite understand it) -- plus also the curious vehemence whenever the jester sexton aka patch is on-stage, cromwell HAAAAAATES him lol, and keeps bumrushing him angrily (and then like half a book later patch is back and TC is saying "what the hell is HE doing here?")

(this hatred is explicable in story-terms, in that patch once work for for wolsey and chose to mock his former employer once he was part of the king's staff, but it's also very extra and in no sense plot-driving: i'm going to argue that the low-born patch who is allowed to say anything acts as a MIRROR for cromwell, throwing unwanted LIGHT on his own self-disgust blah blah… )

finally reading The Mirror & The Light
srsly, just inject this prose into my veins i love it it makes me feel slightly giddy & dreamy.
is that weird?

still wild to me that she can make me feel remotely sympathetic towards Mary or even fkn Henry at times, such is the power of fiction

also the FOOD and TEXTILES in this series my god

(i just finished rereading tM&tL and have a low-key query: has it anywhere been discussed -- or has HM talked abt -- that she plainly devoured thomas harris at some point and certain very identifiable bits re-emerge = wound man, a version of the memory palace, plus also some less easily identifiable moves and tropes now and then)

the notion that TC is in reality the hannibal of the tudors is quite funny to me

i googled this and found a review of "bring up the bodies" which explicitly argues that her love of the historically horrible thomas cromwell is exactly like our love of the finctionaly evil hannibal lecter -- and it was in the evening standard so she very likely also saw it, and (in my theory) went off to read hannibal and clearly liked some of what she read

(i actually think the ES review is dumb but that's not really the point here)

Heh, confounded TC and ES into EC and thought I was back onto another Elvis Costello thread.

Surely somewhere in his enormous corpus he has mentioned Cromwell and/or Lecter at least once perhaps in one of his party/list songs.

a version of the memory palace

This is not exclusive to harris, cf. john crowley's 'little, big' and the aegypt books where it gets traced back to Giordano Bruno, he and it have also cropped up in other things I've read recently that I can't recall (oh the irony). Harris I daresay the most famous though.

Pretty sure it's from Cicero

I started WH some weeks ago and have read two books in between since. I need some headspace, I think.

it's not exclusive to harris no -- i learnt it as "kim's game" from my dad when i was little, so named bcz there's a v basic version in kipling's kim -- but the idea that it's viscerally pertinent to the building of character is more how i responded here (in kim it's just a handy technique that a spy can deploy)

Mantel's prose style is what turns me off reading these; I've tried many times. It's frustrating! People seem to really enjoy them but I must grudgingly say it is Not For Me. I find myself unable to sink into the story because the sentences draw so much attention to themselves. Feature not bug, perhaps?

I find her a great writer.

(i just started a place of greater safety., meeting robespierre etc as children, camille desmoulin is a cheeky sod in this reading)

Greater Safety is beautiful

xposts

to be fair, it did take me a while to start Mirror & the Light — every time I picked it up it felt too dense for what my brain could handle at the time

but I had recently been watching stuff about Mary 1 and other Tudory things & that helped get me in the right frame of kind

so i do understand if it feels like its too much

*mind

The only one that's really stuck with me was Wolf Hall. Bring Up The Bodies felt too short, and The Mirror & The Light too long. Need to re-read all three one of these years.

Watching now. Need to read the books to see how they handle Cromwell's stubborn silences, according to the show his favorite weapon.

We are heartbroken at the death of our beloved author, Dame Hilary Mantel, and our thoughts are with her friends and family, especially her husband, Gerald. This is a devastating loss and we can only be grateful she left us with such a magnificent body of work. pic.twitter.com/d8bzkBBXuH

— 4th Estate Books (@4thEstateBooks) September 23, 2022

One of the greatest British authors of our time.

70 is not old nowadays. But I'm not so surprised because her terrific memoir makes clear how bad her health has been, or at least was, for several decades.

I reflect that she will be celebrated and lamented, but not nearly as much as the late Queen; but that she was much more talented than the late Queen, and put her great talent and intelligence into numerous books, sometimes very long ones, with great productivity and dedication.

I read Wolf Hall and was quite captivated by it at the time, but never found the time to read the follow up or any of her other books. I thought the bbc adaptation was the best drama series they've done for decades and have watched it at least 4 or 5 times. Her style wasn't really my thing and I didn't like her takes on history when she popped on R4 programs occasionally. But still I'd be very happy if there was a tv adaptation of The Mirror & the Light that is as good as WH.

oh I've just heard the WH director saying he is currently working on a production of The Mirror & the Light for the bbc.

Would I get more out of Wolf Hall if I read a Very Short Introduction-type book beforehand? It’s been on my to-read list for ages, but I once started A Place of Greater Safety and felt like I needed a bit more grounding in the French Revolution to really appreciate it. And if the answer is “yes", any recommendations?

Others will disagree, but a passing knowledge of the Tudors is fine, I think. What she does with Cromwell is so immersive that, as much as she's clearly in love with the source material, it kind of renders the histories irrelevant.

What are her best non-WH books? I've read the whole trilogy but felt it was kind of a sharp decline — the first was amazing and perfect, but the second was too short and the third was too long and abandoned the narrative discipline that made the first two work.

I can't really process that Mantel has gone. This is daftly romantic, but she never seemed quite alive in some way, at least not in the way that the rest of us are alive. I need to work out what I mean by that, but somehow her presence and acuity were always otherworldly (this isn't to disrespect Giving Up the Ghost, which is wholly and brutally alive, but that book stands outside everything she's written).