It soon became clear, she says, that she had more than enough material for two. Originally Mantel planned to write a single book about Cromwell's rise and fall.

And it was Cromwell who turned the business of medieval government, run by officers of the king's household, into the forerunner of a recognisably modern bureaucracy, underpinned by Acts of Parliament.Īt 650 pages Wolf Hall is intimidatingly long. He believed the state had a responsibility to look after its poorest citizens. In economics he was a Keynsian long before John Maynard Keynes himself. Mantel's skill is in making the mind of someone operating in such a society accessible to contemporary readers, though it helps that the real Thomas Cromwell had some strikingly modern attitudes.

Her Cromwell is not a modern man in Tudor costume but someone whose mental landscape is that of the early 16th Century: The tail end of the middle ages, just as the Protestant revolution was gaining speed.īring Up The Bodies is the second novel in a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell No-one in Wolf Hall or Bring Up The Bodies says 'prithee', no bodices are ripped, no liberties are taken with the historical record. But she has certainly reinvigorated an often tired and cliched genre. To say that Mantel has reinvented the historical novel is overstating it. It's a very good trick and well worth enjoying twice even if, inevitably, the follow-up doesn't have quite the same breathtaking originality as its predecessor. The good news for fans of Wolf Hall is that Bring Up The Bodies repeats the same trick with aplomb. Her 12th book, it catapulted her from the status of admired but often under-rated literary novelist to worldwide best-seller.Ī few found the book dense and unreadable most found its intimate portrait of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's minister and fixer and one of the most feared and disliked characters in English history, simply irresistible. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize in 2009. Can Bring Up The Bodies meet the high expectations of Mantel's fans, peers and literary critics? Continue reading the main story Related Storiesīooker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel publishes the long-waited sequel to Wolf Hall this week.

Wolf hall sequel book