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

omg the tudors is taking its time removing more's head

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/hilary-mantel-says-final-wolf-hall-book-unlikely-to-come-out-in-2018-as-planned

booooooo

the mirror and the light vs winds of winter betting pool?

give me the mirror and the light and give it me now

reread this thread and realised when i said i skim-read the first two to destress while prepping for my conference BOY was i skim-reading -- just like huge amounts only grapsed at second reading, of story as well as approach

someone above (goole?) sez "ppl are over-estimating how good crom is in the books" and i think this is right -- you are enormously artfully drawn into his version of the story, his justifications, his perspective, his innovations and reworkings of the kingdom into somewhere everyone (inc.the poor!) cd be peaceful and prosperous in… but the ruthlessness of what he's doing is right there in front of you, inc. (in particular) all the beheaded, and the v long game leading to the beheadings. basically anne b is framed so he can revenge himself on mark smeaton for saying he looks like a murderer! i mean yes, almost all the beheaded are terrible ppl -- and almost all his transformations of the structure were good not bad. in the sense that capitalism is arguably better for more ppl than feudalism, and the cromwell-2-cromwell management of the Arrival of the Book was in fact less bloody and awful (a bit less) than the 30 yrs war.

anyway the moral is that cromwell is capitalism and he is able (in two books deliberately fashioned to lens us into his perspective) to give an excellent account of himself for this and other reasons, but all around is shadows and grim horror all the same. he loathes lots of it but he also creates lots of it.

and the conclusion is that these books are THE BEST and the tv show is also but in a different (much more melancholic) way

my mum, a reader but not heavily literary, finished this and then immediately read it from cover to cover again (this before Bring Up the Bodies). not sure what that means but i know she would concur, mark! (she also made the point to me about Cromwell not being good as such, but how effectively you are drawn into his world). I still haven’t read Bring up the Bodies or i think properly finished Wolf Hall.

i wd definitely say you haven't properly finished it until you've reread it at least once, there's a LOT of anticipation and callback going on

(caveat: i am generally still a very skippy reader first time out, and certainly was here but i had other things on my mind)

Heh, I also reread both very recently, and mark s otm both about the books being THE BEST and Cromwell really not, but very seductive as thoughtful hero. (The grammatical third-person voice which is truly first-person in its view is a shrewd device here I suppose.) Would be interested in seeing the tv eventually, but now probably not before reading the final part.

After I read both for the first time, I naturally went for the French Revolution one; I think it may be the only book where I had the dual experience of a) the reading being a bit of a slog, with me constantly looking at the % remaining on my Kindle, and then b) IMMEDIATELY upon finishing, wanting to start from the top.

Just now read The Giant, O'Brien, which just confirmed that damn she can write. I got maybe some Flann O'Brien vibes; I might perhaps suspect the poor-man-Irishry of being slightly iffy in certain weathers, but I don't really have a quite fine enough English-language palate in my reading ear to say anything useful about that.

I know the prose in Wolf Hall was quite delicious. But still haven't got around to reading any of the other books by her taht i picked up. Did enjoy the TV series, is there more coming.
Also enjoyed Mark Rylance in his theatre performance in that thing about ice fishing.

thought this revive was a release date announcement for cromwell #3, y'all are cruel

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-05-08/wolf-hall-series-2-is-at-least-two-years-away-says-director/

the revive was to demand such an announcement, we'all are pro-active

i get it, we're all on team more mantel

‘A place of greater safety’ is well worth the effort. You can, however, definitely see the lessons Mantel has learnt from that in wolf hall. There protagonists and such a big sweep of time makes for a sweeping epic that gets a bit ramble in places trying to fit everything in. Not a bad book by any means but Wolf Hall’s focus on one man and his internal life within the historical context makes makes for a much better one.

agree

Yeah I would never not recommend it; it seems a very, very good imagination of the period and its situations --

Also, a single scene, where after a court session, the young Robespierre vomits at the side of the road at having to pass his first death sentence, will stay with me a bit.

I found it very moving

just in terms of the sheer work itself, it’s a pretty incredible undertaking

on the one hand symmetry would require me to wait for the third one to come out in paperback, even, but on the other hand I don't think my copies of the first two match all that much even, so whatever

the bbc production of this was not too bad for them

https://i2.wp.com/www.fanfunwithdamianlewis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ep6_2.gif

guess I should read this

It’s probably a con but like any good con artist she makes you feel so good about buying into the con

actually that gif has good reason to be posted for more than the very good purposes of razzing calz :D

the scene in the series -- anne is dead, crom arrives to see the king who is gleeful and opens his arms in a delighted hug of triumph -- isn't in the book: in the book, instead, we see henry serene as he prepares to marry jane, and gloomy as he tell crom he, he henry, may now be too old to have a strong boychild, per something he read in plato (odd source for such wisdom tho i guess in this instance plato will prove correct)

it's a capper on the viewpoint of the series, of course: who is bad here? henry is bad. and this delivery of his desire -- even as it also enacts revenge on a bunch of v awful ppl who crossed crom and mocked cranmer, plus anne who he feels more ambivalent about -- of course puts crom right in the cheery bearhug of the king's badness.

one of the devices at work is bodysize: damien lewis is tall and broad, even if his character is changeable and basically whiny -- here's when he's happy he's also terrifying and horrible. unlike the historical cromwell (per holbein) and the book cromwell (per mantel), mark rylance is no physical bulk to be reckoned with.* rylance plays cromwell wary, watchful, memory-full, when alone melancholy. i think if he dominated more physically and on-screen, we'd likely take against him more. but as i say, the tv show wants the king as villain

the book is more this: while full of lovely things including (sometimes) love, the world is bad and to make it better, we too much if we can also do bad things. the king is less a villain, more a force of nature channelled by duty and fear and possibly medical conditions**, with almost random breakouts into friendship or joy. (he is certain written as kind)

*in the book version of the joust scene and henry seemingly dead, when norfolk comes at cromwell, cromwell simply stand firm and lets the other bounce off him
**reading round to discover what these were i wz delighted to discover there is a school of historian thought that argues he was suffering from SCURVY

In the books: Just as the hero is no hero, no villain is a true villain I think; what seems clearly and consistently bad (in Crom's eyes as harbinger of modernity?) is the blithe institutional acceptance, as necessities, of torture and executions, separate and especially in combination: Cromwell's attendance of a witch burning as a child; "It is true there is a rack at the Tower. No one withstands it. No one."; "the law demands the full traitor's penalty, the short spin in the wind and the conscious public disembowelling, a brazier alight for human entrails. It is the most horrible of all deaths, pain and rage and humiliation swallowed to the dregs, the fear so great that the strongest rebel is unmanned before the executioner with his knife can do the job".

All this while the prose is exquisite.

all these references to crom are making me want a wolf hall / conan the barbarian crossover

dude it already exists:

https://d12swbtw719y4s.cloudfront.net/images/hnZfncc8/ZNJ9p3EQT8n605w7Hw1l/03_Church_and_State_1.jpeg?w=620

ok so i started a place of greater safety last week and it's soooo good. i understand what people are saying upthread about the cromwell series' restriction of perspective helps focus the narrative a bit, but she's just such an engaging writer and so good at drawing all these characters that i'm enjoying the sprawl. even though that sprawl does make me less likely to sit down and read 100 pages at a time.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/22/hilary-mantel-the-mirror-and-the-light-announced-for-2020

Book 3 coming in 2020!

HarperCollins said the novel would offer “a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage”. It also confirmed that the novel would be adapted for television by the BBC, following the Bafta-winning adaptation of Wolf Hall starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell. Peter Straughan will write the adaptation, and Peter Kosminsky will direct. A film exploring the life and work of Mantel herself, from Oxford Films, is also due out next March.

hell yeah

woop

Fantastic news, I’ve just been rereading the first 2.

such good news

eat your heart out George RR Martin

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