Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Did I mention I like schlock?

Of course, there is schlock and there is schlock; good schlock and bad schlock, quality schlock and crap schlock. The application of the term is rife with assumptions, snobbery and prejudice.

Thrillers are schlock by definition, no matter the quality of the research, writing, characters, plot or any other criteria. Not long ago a reviewer in the NY Times tried to make the claim that Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko series – beginning with Gorky Park in ’73 and carrying on through Polar Star (’88), Red Square (’91), Havana Bay (’95?) and one or two others that I haven’t read– was in fact perhaps the best Western profile in fiction of that big cold snowy place that used to be called the USSR and is now just known as Russia. The critical world didn’t buy it. Quality schlock it may be, but schlock it remains.

Science Fiction is also schlock. Margaret Atwood may write novels that posit a future technological, sociological, economic or political shift, and use that imagined world to create an allegorical commentary on our own current reality – Handmaid’s Tale, anyone – but when she does it, as she herself sniffs, “it’s not science fiction.” Tell it to Aldus Huxley.

Historical fiction used to be considered schlock, but appears to be pulling itself out of the mire. Consider this book – Wolf Hall – which I only just finished. Full-on historical fiction, set in the steamy bodice-ripping court of Henry VIII, it none-the-less just won the Booker Prize, the world’s leading imprimatur of non-schlocky-heid.

The quality is undeniable. The author, Hilary Mantel, is a lovely stylist, and has a talent for evoking a particular time and place, in this case Tudor England. Whether you have to come to the book with some basic knowledge of the historical events is an open question. It certainly adds spice.

Indeed, much of the pleasure of the book lies in its ongoing argument with A Man for All Seasons, the literal hagiography of Sir Thomas Moore penned by Robert Bolt way back in 1960. Bolt’s Moore was, quite literally, a saint, with all the requisite saintly characteristics – honest, caring, learned, incorruptible, just, forthright, loving creation and life here on earth but willing to die a martyr’s death to remain true to his faith in God.

Mantel’s Moore is a different sort. Chained in the Tower awaiting trial, Moore bewails the injustice of his fate. I have harmed no one, he says.

His jailor, Sir Thomas Cromwell, explodes. What about Bainham, he asks, referring to a friend, a mild-manered Protestant merchant arrested and charged with heresy at Moore’s behest.

“You forfeited his goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with your own eyes, you locked him in Bishop Stokesley’s cellar, you had him back at your own house two days chained upright to a post, you sent him again to Stokesley, saw him beaten and abused for a week, and still your spite was not exhausted: you sent him back to the Tower and had him racked again.”

Not exactly saintly behaviour, unless you believe like Barry Goldwater and certain of the less pleasant popes that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Cromwell, the conniving avaricious snake of Bolt’s work, is rendered here as the ultimate renaissance man – polyglot and polymath, able to swear and brawl in Spanish, trade cloth in Dutch, read Luther in German, kill with a stiletto and calculate compound interest in Italian, cook and arrange royal marriages in French, legislate in Latin, scheme and politic and administer the kingdom in English.

He is also a humanist and free thinker, loathe to persecute men for their beliefs. Oh, and he remains ever faithful to his one true love, lost through illness in his youth.

Much as I appreciate the portrait as rebuttal, methinks Mantel doth protest perhaps a tad too much. Or more than a tad. If this Cromwell could put on a tuxedo and shoot with Walther PPK, he could double as 007. Or do him one better, as Cromwell in this story is self-made, an inn-keeper’s son who pulled himself up by his codpiece.

Were this a thriller, such a characterization might well lead one to conclude the book was schlock.

SPOILER ALERT – ENDING DISCLOSED

Fortunately, not all is so broadly brushed. Indeed, Mantel is often a model on undestatement, and nowhere more so than with the book’s title, which for 98% of the book seems to have no bearing whatever on the contents.

At the penultimate page we have still Cromwell at the height of his powers— rude with good health, blessed with Henry’s unlimited trust, feared by lords and courtiers, courted by the high-born daughters of noble families— arranging a summer progress for his recently-remarried-and-beginning-to-look-around-at-the-other-ladies-again-sovereign-king. Looking over the schedule, Cromwell discovers he has a few extra days to kill, and so inks in a stop at the ancestral home of the noble Seymour clan, whose daughter has lately taken to gently flirting with Sir Thomas. The name of their estate?

Wolf Hall.