Aficionados of Tudor fiction have been on tenterhooks for a fortnight, wondering if the stellar excerpt from Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s forthcoming novel, was some sort of freakish exception rather than an accurate harbinger of the finished work. That wait is now over, and I’m as pleased as anybody (indeed, as the proprietor of “A Year with the Tudors,” I’m a good deal more pleased than the average ticket-holder) to report that the second installment, in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, is if anything better than the first. It’s just flat-out scintillating reading, an order of magnitude better than anything Mantel has previously written (it’s that elevating tendency I already noted in Tudor fiction, bringing out the best in its writers).

The present chapter still centers on nefarious royal agent Thomas Cromwell (”He can draft a statute, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house, and fix a jury”), this time in an interview with Cardinal Wolsey, his employer and King Henry VIII’s trusted ‘vicar of Hell.’ Wolsey at the time of this excerpt is at the height of his power (”He used to say, ‘The King will do such-and-such.’ Then he began to say, ‘We will do such-and-such.’ Now he says, ‘This is what I will do.’”), a vast recumbent figure red vestments,  disposed to teasing his minions and almost regally unwilling to consider the sweaty travails of Cromwell’s behind-the-scenes workings:

 The Cardinal, a bachelor of arts at fifteen, a bachelor of theology by his mid-twenties, is learned in the law but does not like its delays; he cannot quite accept that real property cannot be changed into money with the same speed and ease with which he changes a wafer into the body of Christ. When Cromwell once, as a test, explained to the Cardinal just a minor point of the land law concerning … well, never mind, it was a minor point … he saw the Cardinal break into a sweat and say, ‘Thomas, what can I give you, to persuade you never to mention this to me again?’

The prose on display here is not only first-rate in dealing with the interplay of these convoluted Tudor men; it shines everywhere, even in incidental scenery descriptions:

The damp streets are deserted; the mist is creeping from the river. The stars are stifled in damp and cloud. Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday’s unrecollected sins.

If these two excerpts are any indication, Wolf Hall may end up being the single best Tudor novel of them all, despite formidably stiff competition. The irony that such a work should center on a despicable creature like Thomas Cromwell just adds spice to the prospect. I’ll be sure to keep Open Letters readers apprised of the eventual outcome.

- Steve Donoghue

Ah, the interweavings of synergy! No sooner do I note how every Tom, Dick, and Harriet in the land at some point feels compelled to write Tudor fiction than the latest New York Review of Books appears, in which novelist and critic Hilary Mantel provides an excerpt from, you guessed it, her upcoming Tudor novel!

Her focus is Henry VIII’s scheming henchman Thomas Cromwell, whom she follows throughout the course of his murky background, right up to the pinnacle of his career, as the crowbar Henry used to pry England from the Catholic Church, no matter who is destroyed in the process. The book will be called Wolf Hall, and if this excerpt is any indication, it may well be the best piece of Tudor fiction in recent memory.

Mantel is bold, that at least can be said with certainty. The finest Tudor confection of the 20th century, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, features one indelible scene after another, including a tense, danger-haunted interview in which an exhausted prisoner Thomas More crosses rhetorical swords with Lord Norfolk, Archbishop Cranmer, and Mantel’s subject, the bulldog Cromwell. The words snap on the page:

Cromwell (quickly): You do have objections to the Act?

Norfolk (happily): Well, we know that, Cromwell!

More: You don’t, my lord. You may suppose I have objections. All you know is that I will not swear to it. From shear delight to give you trouble it might be.

Norfolk: Is it material why you won’t?

More: It’s most material. For refusing to swear, my goods are forfeit and I am condemned to life imprisonment. You cannot lawfully harm me further. But if you were right in supposing I had reasons for refusing and right again in supposing my reasons to be treasonable, the law would let you cut off my head.

Norfolk (he has followed with some difficulty): Oh yes.

Cromwell (an admiring murmur): Oh, well done, Sir Thomas. I’ve been trying to make that clear to His Grace for some time.

It takes a writer of singular confidence – or foolhardiness – to plop her own fiction squarely down in that same conference room, to imagine that same interview in full knowledge not only of Bolt’s magisterial words but of the subsequent brilliant performances given by Leo McKern and Paul Scofield in the play’s movie adaptation. Yet Mantel in this excerpt does exactly that, and damn if she doesn’t do herself proud. The scene seethes with life, and the dialogue is the best Mantel has ever written. Take, for instance, her Cromwell’s aria of contempt for More’s refusal to knuckle under to the king’s will – it’s just note-perfect:

Cromwell swears under his breath, turns from the window: “We know his reasons. All Europe knows them. He is against the divorce. He does not believe the King can be head of the Church. But will he say that? Not he. I know him. Do you know what I hate? I hate to be part of this play, which is entirely devised by him. I hate the time it will take that could be better spent, I hate it that minds could be better employed, I hate to see our lives going by, because depend on it, we will all be feeling our age before this pageant is played out. And what I hate most of all is that Master More sits in the audience and sniggers when I trip over my lines, for he has written all the parts. And written them these many years.”

It almost succeeds in dethroning the blessed Saint Thomas, doesn’t it? And the rest of the excerpt is equally assured, and another excerpt is promised. Mantel has obviously caught the peculiar bug I was attempting to diagnose this month in “A Year with the Tudors” – the bug that causes so many Tudor fiction practitioners to up their game considerably. Even this brief passage is yards better fiction than anything Mantel has yet written, and who knows how much better the whole of Wolf Hall will be. I’m sorry it’ll appear after my “Year with the Tudors” has come to a close, but I’ll be reading it eagerly and no doubt presenting my findings when the time comes. In any case, it’s happy and instructive to see the burly river of Tudor fiction surging onward, ever onward!

Steve Donoghue