Thomas, there's no end to you, is there?

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

My only knowledge of Thomas Cromwell when I started this book was a dim memory of the bad guy from Robert Bolt's play, A Man For All Seasons. Perhaps because of this vague preconception, I was all the more besotted by the witty, cunning and humane character at the centre of Wolf Hall.

Wolf Hall details the seemingly unstoppable rise of Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son (at least in Mantel's imagining) who became the closest advisor of King Henry VIII. The novel opens with a glimpse of Cromwell’s childhood under the tyranny of his brutal father before leaping across his formative years as a soldier, accountant and cloth merchant in Europe to his period in the service of the powerful but doomed Cardinal Wolsey. To Wolsey, and later the king, Cromwell becomes an indispensable right-hand man due to his unique talent: he is a man who knows the worth of everything, from a bolt of cloth to a choice of words. This talent translates into the sort of political genius Henry needs to extricate himself from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon – who was unable to bear him a male heir – and marry Anne Boleyn.

Cromwell is a moral conundrum: a man of unflinching loyalty, and full of mercy, yet each morally laudable action he takes seems only to advance his own personal gain. Was he a man of inherent kindness, or just a brilliant gambler? In this decidedly sympathetic portrait of a man over whose motives and character historians are still at odds, Mantel gives one the impression that he could easily be both.

Mantel's characters are tangibly human where authors of historical fiction are sometimes overwhelmed by the figures they are portraying. In her easy, elegant prose she deftly uses humour and everyday detail to help the characters live and breathe in a 21st century imagination. Cromwell, seemingly single-handedly, engineers massive change in affairs of state, yet it is the moments of tenderness and vulnerability with his wife Liz and two daughters that linger in my mind.

The year that Grace was an angel, she had wings made of peacock feathers. He himself had contrived it. The other girls were dowdy goose creatures...[but] Grace stood glittering, her hair entwined with silver threads; her shoulders were trussed with a spreading, shivering glory, and the rustling air was perfumed as she breathed. Lizzie said, Thomas, there’s no end to you, is there?

Although the span falls across the crucial period of the Reformation, in which England cuts its ties with the church in Rome, this is not a novel of events or racing plot. Its cast of characters is so vast it requires a five-page list at the start of the book to assist the reader in keeping them straight. Yet it is the very bulk of this one man’s character that fills Wolf Hall’s 650-odd pages, and makes it one of the most compulsive, impressive and satisfying novels I have read for a long time.