#3: Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

I really don't understand how Wolf Hall won this year's Booker Prize because the novel is awful. Although I finished the book weeks ago, I put off blogging about it - I just wanted to forget about it, Wolf Hall was that bad. (It amazes me that most professional reviewers and about half the Amazon reviewers thought it was brilliant...why?)

My biggest issue with the book was the vague use of pronouns. There are nearly 100 characters listed at the front and most of them are men. When they show up on the page, they're often identified simply as "he." In conversations, "he" is talking and it's up to the reader to puzzle out the speaker's identity (which is frankly too much work). In addition, Mantel often doesn't start new paragraphs when the action/speech switches to another character, so it became very difficult to figure out who was doing what. Good writing embraces and loves language and I don't understand how a book that misuses its main tool won a major prize. *Head. Thunk.*

So, as mentioned above, there are 96 characters listed at the front of the book - and most of them have, like, three names (family name, landowning title, professional title, etc) - so the book abounds with people. And, frankly, it seemed like there was very little to distinguish them. Aside from Cromwell and his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, the characters just flitted in and out of the pages in a one-dimensional funk. The only people I found to be at all interesting besides the aforementioned were Jane Seymour, of all people, and Mary Boleyn - and sadly, they didn't appear much in the novel.

Lastly, I didn't quite understand the arc of the story, which interestingly is the same criticism I had about another (quasi-) Tudor novel, The White Queen. I know Cromwell's story and yet I still had no idea where Wolf Hall was going. And in the end, I would argue, it didn't really go anywhere. The novel ends with the death of Thomas More, which I didn't at all understand. He and Cromwell weren't really enemies, just men with different viewpoints, so it's not like there was a big power struggle or showdown, at least in the novel. My only guess is that Mantel ends the story at this random point to preserve something for the rumored sequel? I guess I just think that a story about a man's rise naturally moves to said man's fall - and yet, Wolf Hall ends years before that. Heck, it even ends before Anne Boleyn's downfall. It just ends, so randomly.

So yeah, Wolf Hall - to get through it, I basically just gave up on it. I stopped caring whether or not I understood who was speaking or what they were talking about and just kept turning the pages. Which is kind of pathetic, really.