Monday, July 12, 2010

WOLF HALL - Hillary Mantel


Once upon a time I swore that I would never again read a Mann Booker winner,and I have stuck to this for several years until two weeks ago when a friend mentioned that her book club was about to attack the 700 pages of Wolf Hall.

So, armed with this information I spoke with two book sellers I know and they both said this was a fantastic book and I should get into it. So I did.

I read the entire thing concerning Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, Henry the Eight and Anne Boleyn and the split from Rome.

This book is really well written and the information concerning the history around the main characters is fascinating, but for me it started to drag after the first one hundred pages.

The positives for me were, as above, the historical facts of the characters, the fact that there was not one tedious description of the english countryside or any detail concerning the attire of the characters.

There are some marvellous lines - I have never read of a " river creeping".

The biggest negative was that I had to keep re-reading paragraphs because Mantel keeps referring to "he" and I kept loosing whether "he" was Cromwell, More or other characters.

This is a great novel and probably deserves the "Booker" but it just wasn't for me, not because it was no good rather I just didn't like it.

No comments:

Post a Comment