Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 3/5 cats
hilary mantel is such a tease. she calls her book wolf hall because she knows i have a crush on jane seymour, and then she just blah blah blahs about thomas cromwell for 500 pages, feeding me only tiny bites of jane. sigh. me and hil have always had a rocky history. i have read four of her books now, and have only really liked one; beyond black. but i keep trying. this one was for class, but i probably would have read it anyway, because this summer i read a nice fat bio of henry VIII and really enjoyed a lot of “characters” in his court. but it is so frustrating, reading historical fiction or biographies. this is only my third tudor book (because, yes, i totally read the other boleyn girl), and the malleability of history and the filters through which authors present these people is terribly inconsistent, depending on their own prejudices. i loved chupuys in the weir book, but here he is so foppish and weird – like a less fuckable david bowie in labyrinth. sometimes mary boleyn is a victim, sometimes she is cold and calculating, sometimes she is just a party girl depending on who is telling me the story. damn apologists. there were sections of writing i loved here, but most of it was flat, to me. i thought the opening was great, and the last 60 pages or so were fairly rollicking, but for some reason much of the middle seemed arid, but peppered with episodes i loved. i am glad that i read it, and a lot of my resistance may have just been my poor fever-riddled brain’s inability to concentrate for any reasonable period of time, but i’m not swayed to mantelmania just yet. try try again.
addition: can someone help me with this, because i am getting conflicting opinions from people i trust equally. please tell me how to pronounce “chupuys.” one smart person said it was pronounced “cha-pwah”, and another smart person made it rhyme with “pepys.” fix this rift for me please.
