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

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.

Yeah, I enjoyed it but can't explain why. It sort of felt superficial AND bogged down in detail.

Watching this tonight but I feel it'll be a let-down after the RSC production, which really rattled through the book but also nailed a lot of it.

I liked it but the tone/rhythm is a bit funny - seems reserved or a bit shy of drama – acting serious w/o being especially serious. I dunno tho', a bit early to judge really & v watchable.

I am quite in love with this after ep 1

DaveM otm

In the book Cromwell is polite to a fault but carries bags of unspoken menace; didn't really see that in Rylance

It also seemed odd to completely bypass Cromwell's rude upbringing which really flavors the entire tone of the book (and establishes that menace, actually, now that I think about it)

Speaking of menace, Jonathan Pryce seemed entirely too doddering for my conception of Wolsey, who I always imagined looking and behaving like a somewhat more brooding version of Alex Salmond

Sculptors re-use their clay and David Annand used the clay of Wolsey's head to model Alex Salmond's!

http://www.ipswichsociety.org.uk/newsletter/dispart.php?issue=187&art=16

of course he did

I enjoyed this but everyone in it feels slighter and more genteel than they should, except maybe Thomas More. I didn't get much menace out of Rylance at all, he seemed actually incredibly understated. Having said that, we've only seen him in family man/loyal servant mode so that's possibly natural and perhaps both character and actor have a way to go.

It also seemed odd to completely bypass Cromwell's rude upbringing which really flavors the entire tone of the book (and establishes that menace, actually, now that I think about it)

They showed him being beaten by his father which is virtually all you see of his upbringing IIRC. It's been a while since I read it though.

Could have done with more in the way of dry humour early on, perhaps. I laughed out loud at the trial scene, and the Boelyns. Looking forward to the scenes with Mary.

Actually there was just the right level off obnoxious little toad coming off the kid playing Mark.

Yeah but that beating establishes everything - our sympathy for Cromwell, the psychological basis for preferring the rationality of the law to the force of a truncheon, but also the intimate knowledge of raw boozy brawling that no one else he has truck with really has an inkling of

I dunno I think I am also possibly simply allergic to televised Tudor costume dramas no matter what their pedigree

The book is so remarkable because of its tone, the way everything is so poised, all relations feel magnetized and suspended precariously in their current patterns, disaster always feels round the corner. Who can forget, having read it, that description of Wolsey in his chamber, and the shadows surrounding him? He becomes something more than a man, he is a force, a spirit-being. You get none of this in the TV show but there's no reason you couldn't, if given the license to be more creative and impressionistic with the photography and soundtrack

Reading the book again and it's astonishing how much of the story is gone. Even the main event, the divorce, seems barely sketched in, a mere backdrop for Cromwell's slowly shifting relations with the other major players, his inexorable gaining of the upper hand. After the last scene of his meeting with the king I thought that just might be enough to keep me watching, though I agree that Rylance lacks menace.

yeah the major "historical" events are sort of backdrop in the book

Intricately detailed backdrops, though. You could pretty much use it as a history textbook, unlike the show.