Title: Wolf HallAuthor: Hilary Mantel
I've heard so much buzz about Wolf Hall (it won last year's Booker Prize) that I knew that I'd have to read it eventually. I'm no novice to books about Tudor England. I've read Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser's books about Henry and his wives and, yes, The Other Boleyn Girl. I found all of those books more readable and accessible than Wolf Hall. I've been in a bit of a slump with my running lately, and I finally decided that it was because I was dreading putting my earbuds in and listening to Wolf Hall for another hour. It's funny, because in retrospect, I feel like I learned a lot about Thomas Cromwell (or at least Hilary Mantel's portrayal of him here as intelligent and paternal-- he's viewed quite differently in A Man for All Seasons, which favors Thomas More), but all of the action in the novel seems to take place in dialogue instead of in actual things happening.
Once again, I didn't love the narrator of the audiobook and was irritated by the voices he assumed for each character, which seemed to insinuate too much about what the characters were like instead of allowing a reader to decide for herself if she liked them. I loved the domestic scenes in the book-- the snapshots of Cromwell as a young man, the snippets of him walking through his orchards and losing his wife and daughters and marrying off the men in the family, but frankly, I found a lot of the chatter between Cromwell and other members of the court to get pretty tiresome after a while. It makes me imagine that being a member of Henry's court was pretty tiresome too. Tiresome, that is, when you weren't worrying about being sent off to the Tower of London. Now that I've finished Wolf Hall, I hope that running will become fun again.
5 comments:
I did a Wolf Hall "read along" with a blogging friend early this year -- and I loved it. But I READ it. It is dialogue heavy, which I thought was the beauty of the book, so maybe it didn't translate to audio.
It was hard to keep track of ALL the THOMASs.
Not that you want to read all of our read along posts, but here is link anyway;
http://www.gerberadaisydiaries.com/search/label/Wolf%20Hall%20Wednesdays
I had intended to link to your blog in my post but my computer crashed and then I forgot, so thanks for supplying the link. I think that one thing that was hard about the audiobook was that I sometimes would get distracted and lose the thread of a conversation and then I'd be hopelessly lost until the conversation ended. But I agree that the dialogue was brilliant and very witty.
If you ever do another "read along" and want another reader, it sounds like lots of fun.
While everyone is talking about the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird -- it's also the 25th anniversary of Lonesome Dove -- so my blogging friend Leah and I are going to have a "read along" after Labor Day.
By the way...have you read The Cellist of Sarajevo?? You can finish it in one day! So good!
Both Lonesome Dove and TKAMB are great reads!
I just ordered Cellist of Sarajevo for my Kindle. It looks amazing!
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