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

the description of boleyn's final moments was v moving & sad

breaking up the wolf hall saga into three books seems like a decision made based on a place of greater safety, which is great but SO long, and flags in a bunch of different places, and would probably benefit from being crafted or structured as 2-3 sections that would each need to stand alone

that being said im not even sure the butb stands alone, as such

I need this to be at least 5 books.

someone put hilary on the blower, I need her to understand what I'm asking

I think three books is enough but we need to start campaigning for the next series to be about Oliver Cromwell.

I can't imagine how much work and research goes into books like these and if I were Hillary Mantel I'd want to spend the next few years drinking cocktails and writing pulp about teenage s&m vampires.

I don't think I've ever gone into historical fiction knowing less about a character and finishing the book loving the character so completely

ok that made no sense but I stand by it

hah er i bought these on someone's recommendation and left them on the shelf because i was like enh tudors. then i saw the name cromwell in connection with them and started reading them thinking man, i guess i was wrong about the tudor thing, cromwell, awesome. then i realised i was thinking of the wrong cromwell.

max do you think it was a publisher's decision, or something an agent or editor might have nudged her along the path to? it somehow feels not at all internal to the work on some level. and i sort of feel like it could have as easily been one brick as three long romps, and i feel like it would have actually been even better as three tightly plotted short novels, and i wish someone had pushed her either that way or in the direction of brick

on the other hand i feel like she deserves booker winner level publicity and money, so

thomp I did the same thing, like wow this oliver cromwell dude was way more chill than I thought

oy

I don't really know Thom!

I guess I'm partly thinking of a friend who I loaned both the Cromwell books and she finished them quickly but took forever with apogs. Which was similar to my experience. Could very easily just be that apogs is not as good or at least less engaging

well the difference is cromwell. there is no one individual to ride in apogs, nothing like the character she built with cromwell and the way she uses that perspective, which are definitely what pushes those books to another level. but it is still a great book with a lot of the same basic qualities. i don't know how important familiarity with the context is, i feel like everyone kind of knows the henry 8 stuff even if not crom himself? anyway, i wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to someone who enjoyed these books.

if these are better than apogs (of which I have ~350pp left) I canny wait to read em and hope to do so before seeing the plays in june

I'm around half way through APOGS and although it is a good book, Wolf Hall and Bring up the bodies are superior books. APOGS suffers a little from the canvas being just too large, she even apologises at the start of the book for exorcising Dr Marat from the proceedings. Stylistically Mantel has developed a much more sparse style for the Cromwell books, she can cover much more plot in much less text and the sparse style make the key moments stand out all the more poignantly.

I think APOGS has to many individuals, Cromwell provides a dramatic locus that has to be spread over Camille, Danton and Robespierre. The Cromwell books also seem to be much more about families, all of the main characters are grounded in their family units, The royal household, the cromwell household, the seymours, the even outsiders like Chapuis seem to get added and viewed as part of the Cromwell family. Catherine's pain seems to be rooted in her exile from any kind of family. APOGS doesn't have this lens to see things through and is more complex as a result.

Still a great read.

see plenty of householdism in apogs though there isn't a lot of dwelling and within a v large canvas agree

also never hear from marat but he is recurringly present

was gonna say, there are a lot of households in apogs!

I was steeling myself to not really enjoy APOGS as much, and worried that I was reading it to soon after Bring up the Bodies

but I'm enjoying it!

It def does suffer from having such a massive cast of characters, I occasionally get kinda swimmy with the details 'what? who? huh? oh who cares just keep reading' but her ability to make these distant historical figures so human and, idk, alive, is really something

sometimes I wish we didn't have to whisk away from characters so quickly, I'm always looking back over my shoulder as we move onto the next thing like aw man I was just starting to dig those dudes do we have to leave

apogs were great

fun finally reading all the wiki articles for people I knew nothing about before and was avoiding so as not to spoilerise myself

yeah it's like, holy crap EVERY character is a real person

Is the creepy harp player who hangs out with the women folk and cromwell has a hate-on for a real guy?

Oh shit, that's Mark Smeaton isn't it! (I'm just starting BUTB)

lute, dog

Ha, and here I thought he was the most made-up seeming character

The stage version would be a good thing to go to.

it was a good thing to go to difficult to measure it against the book with limitations necessarily imposed most obviously on time and cast but the elisions are neatly done on the whole it's a good brisk sketch. seeing bring up the bodies this week.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2653199/Damien-Lewis-appears-Tudor-custom-play-King-Henry-VIII-new-BBC-drama-Wolf-Hall.html

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/09/article-2653199-1E9CD10400000578-44_634x488.jpg

he doesn't look a thing like tebow

I'm just early in Wolf Hall, but really enjoying it. Supposedly I will read the whole thing in time for a book club discussion next weekend, we'll see. ...

― something of an astrological coup (tipsy mothra), Saturday, 30 March 2013 17:10 (1 year ago) Permalink

Ha. Well, a year and a half later -- I'm done! I really loved this book, but life kept intervening and I would go months without picking it up. Finished the last couple hundred pages on a binge this week (partly thanks to a few long travel days hanging out in airports). The writing is so good, so smart and sharp, and Cromwell is such a great prism to see the whole period through. It would be a much different and less entertaining book told from the POV of any of the royals.

Even though the whole thing obviously has a modern perspective, I like how she resists judging anyone by contemporary standards. There aren't really any good guys, but nobody's exactly evil either -- they're all just pursuing self-interests and reacting to the political world of the time. I will definitely read Bring Up the Bodies, but I might wait a few months -- I like the prospect of getting to hang out with Cromwell some more, I don't want to use it all up too quickly and the third one's not out til (supposedly) next year.

Also: the characters least motivated by self-interest -- the protestant martyrs on the one hand, Thomas More on the other -- are in some ways the least sympathetic. Cromwell (and Mantel) don't have a lot of patience for inflexibility.

there are hints throughout that cromwell (as a proto-modern) understands that making henry's state as powerful as possible will secure life and peace for england's people -- that he for some reason is the only one with a dim memory of the civil wars that henry7 ended. lurking beyond henry8's failed marriage and childlessness was war, this time with possible foreign intervention. (and it happened anyway, under another cromwell)

mantel has a lot of fun making more a misogynist prig, but she doesn't make him wrong. i think she at least gives him the gift of seeing things clearly: there was no good legal reason to get rid of catherine, it was the elevation of desire over law, and using it to turn the country away from the church had more to do with national power than conscience. cromwell at the end has to all but beg him not to die for it. that the misogynist is the only one to feel disgust at what henry's men are doing to catherine is another irony.

there are sentences throughout tho that cromwell doesn't know why he does what he does. "what else is there, but affairs?" etc

oh shiiiit

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/books/review/the-assassination-of-margaret-thatcher-august-6th-1983.html?_r=0

what happened to this hbo series then?

oh I guess it's BBC and PBS now, which means no boobs.

http://deadline.com/2014/12/wolf-hall-preview-damian-lewis-mark-rylance-bbc-masterpiece-1201320301/

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/14/hilary-mantel-attacks-critics-bbc-margaret-thatcher-story-broadcast

A respectably robust response but: "I do wonder about the journalists involved. The paper doesn’t write itself,” she said. “Sooner or later, surely, they must start to feel ashamed of their paper’s attempt to bully and censor?” - hmmmm probably not.

Fucking cannot stand Damian Lewis but still very stoked for this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kT2lMkhldc

January on BBC2....April 2015 on PBS boo
(or sooner on the torr3ntz) weeeeeeeeee

BRING IT ON

I don't know anything about Ben Miles but he seems a decent Cromwell. God bless those torr3nt sites, they bring so much joy into my life!

none of those lines sound familiar at all.

he looks appropriately crusty and grumpy

I've started it. Need to finish it - like everything else I pick up - before I probably inevitably see the play.

tonite

I am so excited I almost made a hot mess!

Fucking cannot stand Damian Lewis but still very stoked for this.

Same, who is this ginger butt even going to play on this.

Only Henry Viii

can't believe newsnight are doing a live reaction to it.

how was it

This felt both rushed and too slow at the same time; and Mark Rylance too fragile and passive as Cromwell, I thought. Twas OK tho.