You know there’s something unique about a book when you start waking up in the middle of the night and realise you’ve been dreaming about its world and characters. When a book has become almost so unbearably vivid and you’ve become so immersed in it that you feel exhausted by the time you finish it.

Am I about to write a totally over-the-top I’d-give-this-book-my-first-born review?

Why, yes. Yes I am.

The winner of the Man Booker Prize for 2009, Wolf Hall treads well-worn territory – King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn? Who hasn’t seen the TV series, the movies or read the inevitably trashy and anachronistic “historical” fiction that has told the Tudor tale again and again? But with Wolf Hall, Mantel has literally rewritten this landscape of historical fiction.

Wolf Hall is the story of the man Thomas Cromwell – a man who happens to have been a courtier and advisor to Henry and Anne, a capricious man, a man constantly up against the constraints of his class, constantly overturning the rules of his age – and constantly weaving a rather tricky path between the various, often life-threatening, vagaries of the times and world he lives in.

So, no cookie-cutter historical character charade here – this is a true delve into the mind and life of an historical figure. And make no mistake – this is no codpieces down, corsets up beach-reading romp. This requires thinking and concentration, though this reader had no problem concentrating. If anything I had a bigger problem letting this world go every time I had to put the book down. There is just so much detail here that you feel you’re living every day of the 8 years of Cromwell’s life that are covered with him. It is quite an astonishing feat of scholarship and imagination, and reading it can at times feel like an equally astonishing feat.

Mantel’s quirk of referring to Cromwell only as “he” (particularly when assigning dialogue) can also throw up some roadblocks and requires a fair amount of “Wait, who said that?” re-reading. But when you’re re-reading writing this good, who cares? (Well, apparently some people do but fie I say, fie to them.)

The language here is sparse but no less effecting for that – the passages after Cromwell loses his wife are not overdone but remain incredibly moving and there’s a good dollop of humour spiced with nastiness served up throughout. The many characters can often have a floating peripheralness but Mantel gives those central to the moment more earthiness with sometimes just one sentence or line of dialogue, and as the book continues those such as Henry and Anne become more substantial and more real to us. And Cromwell, ah Cromwell… we are absorbed in his mind, as well as his story.

I loved Wolf Hall. I loved its difficulties, I loved its quirks, I loved its utter commitment to the world it portrays. Wolf Hall is supposed to be the first in a trilogy …the idea that there is more of this to be had is just awesome.

Voices murmur. Sunlight outside. He feels he could almost sleep, but when he sleeps Liz Wykys comes back, cheerful and brisk, and when he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again.

Tags: Book Reviews, Booker prize, bookiemonster, historical fiction, new books