Review: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

DNF.

Got about 150 pages through this book and gave up. On the positive side, there are a handful of truly funny and devious exchanges and dialogs, and the story of Thomas Cromwell and Henry the XIII are genuinely interesting.

On the negative side, I couldn’t stand the writing style. Sometimes dialog is in quotation marks, sometimes it’s not; sometimes you know who is speaking, and sometimes, it’s really hard to figure it out; sometimes, “he” is Thomas Cromwell, and sometimes its not; sometimes, Thomas or Tom was Thomas Cromwell, but often, it was not (there are, I kid you not, no less than eight Thomases in this story). Occasionally, the writing style would feel like a magical, omniscient narrator’s dream-like stream of consciousness, which is perhaps what the author was going for, but too often, it felt like a weird, rambling, confusing tell-rather-than show mess.

I have to say that the show that is based on this book was able to take this messy material and turn it into something polished and enjoyable, largely due to the brilliant acting of Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell. But the book lacks the acting and the polish, and when I found myself re-reading the same passage for the 10th time, trying to understand which of the eight Thomases they were talking about, I gave up.

Rating: 2 stars