Wolf Hall

By Hilary Mantel

It’s the winner of the 2009 Booker Prize. It is historical fiction. It is British. I went into Wolf Hall with great expectations but it took me a whole month and a lot of pushing myself to get through it. Blame it on the mammoth 650 pages, on my less than deep knowledge of British history, on the disconcerting present tense of the narrative. But finish it I did, coming away more familiar and more than a little fascinated with a quite incredible part of British history.

Wolf Hall is set between 1527 and 1535…or thereabouts. For some kind of perspective, 1530 was the year Babur died leaving Humayun a tentative hold on his Indian territories. The Vijayanagar kingdom is in its last throes in the South. The reformist movement against the Church is in full swing in Europe and Shakespeare’s birth is still a quarter of a century away.

England is under the Tudor king Henry VIII. Whom we all know had innumerable wives and proved to be the reason for England’s break with the Roman Catholic Church. The hero is a Thomas Cromwell (not the Oliver Cromwell of the civil war fame, but a distant ancestor), advisor to Henry and the chief architect of the break with the Catholic Church. Apparently, Thomas Cromwell is a villainous figure in British history, a ruthless conniving man who amassed wealth and quite immense power through dubious means. Hilary Mantel has a different take.

Mantel writes this novel from Thomas Cromwell’s perspective. We see 16th century England in all its flux, its cruelty, its opportunities… through his eyes. A commoner who rises to one of the most powerful positions in England, Mantel’s Cromwell is a man of varied abilities. He speaks a dozen languages, knows the New Testament by heart, is well versed in the law, economics and even poetry. A self-made man, he epitomizes meritocracy in an age when blood is everything.

In the first part of the book, we see him as the right hand man of Cardinal Wolsey, a position he has got to after spending years in Italy and Belgium in various trades. Wolsey is of course Henry’s Cardinal, his conduit to Rome. We see Henry trying to get out of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon (quite a fascinating portrait of a tough, proud queen) and when the Cardinal cannot convince Rome of Henry’s right to marry again, he falls out of favour with the king, dying a lonely death. It sets the stage for Cromwell’s ascendancy with Henry.

Cromwell with his powers of persuasion, his practical ruthlessness, his nuanced reading of people, is able to do what the Cardinal could not… find a way for Henry to marry Anne Boleyn. It takes an irreparable break with the Church, passing laws that are not the most popular, hanging a number of Bishops and Cardinals, including Thomas More and making the king supersede the Church in England. In the process, he gets Anne, a woman he does not particularly like, the position of Queen. Anne’s portrait is a powerful one – a strong woman who uses sex (or the withholding of it) to get what she wants, a lowly noblewoman who stands up to a queen, cruel to her sister, kind to those she thinks would be useful, manipulative, willful, vindictive.

The rivalry with Thomas More is quite a riveting part of the book. Apparently, popular history has More as the wronged hero and Cromwell as the villain who is responsible for hanging him. Mantel shows More in a very poor light – as a cold zealot, cruel in his idealism, prescribing harsh punishment to people who do not believe as he does. He runs a brutal house, is mean to his wife and even at his death, prefers the utopia of martyrdom to giving up on his ideals.

In contrast, his arch rival Cromwell is all practicality, leaning towards the reformist influence in the Church, yet never zealously so. He tends to the way of compromise, of meeting people mid way, to make things work. More sneers at Cromwell’s practicality, his almost centrist approach… and pays the price with his head.

The book ends with Anne as queen, with a daughter, with a 2nd miscarried pregnancy and an almost imperceptible fading of the honeymoon days. Mantel chooses to end the book at this point, making the More- Cromwell and Anne-Katherine clashes the centerpieces of the story. We as readers know that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Anne does not get to be queen for long, Wolf Hall (the residence of the Seymours, one of whom gets to be the next queen) is the next port of call…and Cromwell himself will one day fall out with the king and be left to die. But that is left to another book, perhaps.

Mantel makes the turmoil in 16th century England real in a way only good historical novels can. There is very little description, the language is today’s, the period piece is lightly told, never overwhelming character or plot…yet we can acutely sense the cruelty in the burnings, the fright of the plague, the deadly intrigue at court. The bigger issues of church vs state, of religion as bigger than nation, of the centre of power shifting to global traders who control the money, they all form the backdrop to this interesting story.

The present tense and the third person narrative that is almost first person can prove challenging at times. So too does the sometimes non-chronological jumps in story. But there is a power in Mantel’s language that is difficult to ignore. It was 650 pages, it was a history I did not completely know (and a lot of nuances I missed therefore, I am sure), and I had to plough through it at times…but I am glad I read it. History can be spellbinding, especially when told as a story as interesting as this.

Disgrace

By J.M. Coetzee

I am a sucker for Booker prizewinners. At least most of them. So I pick up the 1999 winner Disgrace, by the South African (now Australian, I think) writer J.M. Coetzee. And turns out he is also a Nobel Prize winner!

The title of the book describes the state David Lurie is in. 52 years old, twice divorced, Lurie teaches poetry at a Capetown University. In an impulsive Lolita moment, he starts an affair with a young student. He loses his job in the process and thus starts his descent into disgrace. David retires to his daughter Lucy’s home in the country hoping to clear his mind and see what can come out of a vague dream of writing a book on Byron.

Rural life in South Africa for a white man and his single daughter is not idyllic. That fact is brought home rather forcefully when strangers, who later turn out to be relatives of Lucy’s African neighbour and helper, render David and Lucy helpless in a rather violent attack against them. The difference in the way the older man and the younger woman react to the attack is telling. David is angry and wants his daughter to give up her land and go away, maybe away from South Africa itself. His daughter however decides to stay.

The burden of history turns out to be hard to bear for white South Africa. In the countryside they are forced to barricade themselves against a hostile world, and still end up with the possibility of a bullet in the back. Or they could choose to leave. Lucy’s generation is learning to start all over again, learning to adapt, to forge new relationships, start with nothing again. David cannot do the same, or won’t do the same and he is left to rely on his fledgling Byronic opera and his new-found love for stray animals (another species left with nothing) as substitutes for the strength to carry on.

It is a bleak novel, yet there is a sense of re-building as if from a wasteland. Just as Lucy’s child begins its life in her womb, a child born of violence and helplessness, David and Lucy have to begin life again in deepest Africa. All the dilemnasof white South Africa are brought to life in this short and sharp novel from a writer with an obvious talent for a layered tale. Coetzee is a new discovery, one I will explore more of.

The Line of Beauty

By Alan Hollinghurst

Here is, at last, a new writer in my library. But my first encounter with Hollinghurst has been a bit of a shocker. The explicit gay sex scenes and the unabashed depiction of drug use overwhelm first impressions. This mix of coke, sex and exquisite language proves to be a heady cocktail.

Nick Guest is a guest, a paying one at that, at the Feddens, an upper class English family with political ambitions. He is an outsider, an imposter in the Fedden world of power, glamour and wealth. Yet, Nick with his passion for Henry James and his intimate knowledge of aesthetics is the true inheritor of beauty. The Feddens might have a Gaurdi on their mantelpiece but it is Nick who understands its true worth. Nick is intoxicated with the idea of being a part of the Feddens because they represent to him a world that he should truly belong to. Yet in Gatsby-like fashion, it is evident he never does.

Gatsby’s 20-s Jazz-age America is Nick’s 80-s Tory England. It is an age where there is an impression of giddy success, where things are hurtling towards disaster, yet life goes on blithely, almost festively. Gerald Fedden is a Tory MP and his wife Rachel, whose house it is, is the one with the aristocratic title. Their son Toby is Nick’s college mate and introduces him to the household. His sister Catherine is the disturbed and rebellious child who the family does not know how to deal with. It is Nick who gets the closest to her, yet ultimately fails to understand exactly how disturbed she really is.

We are treated to 4 years of Nick’s life at the Feddens, exposed to a world of social privilege and pretension, of unapologetic Tory arrogance (with even an evening where Margaret Thatcher herself makes an appearance), of decadence beyond control. Nick himself remains a fascinated observer at first but we find him slowly entering this world and becoming a part of its dissolution, all the while remaining at some central level detached from it. His first encounter with homosexual sex in a garden is detailed dramatically, vividly. The sex scenes then become repetitive and increasingly casual, there is a lot of drug use (the coke line is another line of beauty) especially when Nick gets involved with a Middle-Eastern tycoon, a Dodi-type character, with whom Nick founds a magazine Ogee. Ogee (the curve that is a characteristic of a style of Gothic architecture) is the book’s real line of beauty, and proves to be the culmination of Nick’s quest for the beautiful. AIDS rears it ugly head, snatching away Nick’s lovers one by one. And as the Feddens’ personal and political lives start slowly disintegrating, Nick finds himself the outsider again, never truly able to belong. Yet, we know that at heart, Nick is the observer, able to see the society and age for what it really is – a shallow, bigoted and pretentious one.

Hollinghurst writes beautifully. His language is the best part of the book and some passages just beg to be underlined. While describing Toby’s liking of showing off his rower’s body, Hollinghurst writes ‘It was the easy charity of beauty’, capturing the unrequited longing in Nick beautifully. Nick’s observations about the people and society around him are exquisite. He calls the world a ‘looking-glass world’, where people are constantly looking around to seek validation of their worth. Describing Paul Tomkins, a fellow-Oxfordite, he says ‘It was a mystery to him that fat old Polly, who was rutted with acne scars and completely lacking in ordinary kindness, had such a conspicuous success with men… Nothing that lasted, but startling triumphs of will, opportunism and technique, even so.’ And describing the atmosphere at the Ogee office, he says ‘So he prattled on, mixing up sex and scholarship, and enjoying his wanderings away from he strict truth. In fact that was really the fun of it. And it seemed to fit in with the air of fantasy in the Ogee office, the distant sense of an avoided issue.’ Almost every page has such exquisite turns of phrase, and it kept me going, even when the sex and the coke began to pall.

It took me a long time to get to this book – it was the 2004 Booker winner – yet I am glad I waited. I would have been disappointed with it if I had read it along with the hype surrounding it. Now was a good time – away from distractions, I could savour the delicious language and setting at my own time and pace.