Book review: Wolf Hall

Henry VIII's much-hated chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, who oversaw the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, makes a "surprising" choice of hero, said Christopher Tayler in the Guardian.

The famous portrait of him, after Holbein, makes him look ruthless and sinister; Robert Bolt cast him as the villain to Thomas More's hero in A Man for All Seasons; but in Hilary Mantel's terrific new novel, this "backstairs manoeuvrer" is convincingly portrayed as a sympathetic and enlightened figure.

Her Cromwell, the son of a drunken Putney blacksmith, has had a harsh childhood and has served as a banker and soldier on the continent, before establishing himself as Cardinal Wolsey's trusted agent.

A man "at home in a courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard, he can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury."

Much of Wolf Hall concerns a trickier task: helping the King divorce in order to marry Anne Boleyn. "Lyrically yet cleanly written, solidly imagined yet filled with spooky resonances, and very funny at times, it's not like much else in British fiction."

There are some bits of history that "it's easy to think you've had too much of", said Vanora Bennett in the Times. "But as soon as I opened the book I was gripped. I read it almost non-stop. When I did have to put it down, I was full of regret the story was over. This is a wonderful and intelligently imagined retelling of a familiar tale from an unfamiliar angle."

Mantel's revisionist take is "brilliantly done", said Claudia FitzHerbert in the Daily Telegraph. Her Cromwell is "a reformer but not a zealot", humanised by the deaths of his wife and daughters. Her Thomas More, "physically grubby and mentally vain", taunts his wife with Latin jokes about her ugliness, and brings about his own martyrdom out of self-regard. Even Henry is fresh and vivid: Mantel describes him in his bedchamber, with his sable gown falling down over his hands, "as if he were a monster-king, growing his own fur".

Wolf Hall is a "beautifully written and terrifying fiction" of life in Henry VIII's service, said Lucy Hughes-Hallett in the Sunday Telegraph. Mantel's Tudor England is "so concrete you can smell the rain-drenched wool cloaks and feel the sharp rushes underfoot, and so weird its people believe themselves surrounded by boggarts and black-fanged serpent queens".

The author is working on the second volume; the first book stops with More's execution, with the monasteries undissolved and Anne Boleyn still alive. "I wait greedily for the sequel."
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, 650pp (Fourth Estate, £18.99). The Week Bookshop £17.09 (inc p&p)