With apologies to Hilary Mantel

Raising criticisms, however loving or justified, about monumental achievements is embarrassing.  About six months ago, for example, I asked a friend what she thought of Hilary Mantel's novel, Wolf Hall.  I'd just bought the book, but I hadn't yet read it.  "It's me," said my friend, feeling apparently that she had to apologize for not raving passionately about it.  "I'm Tudor-ed out."

Having just finished the novel (no, it didn't take me six months to read; it took me six months to get around to reading it), I feel - like my friend - a teeny bit let down.  And like my friend, I feel like I have to apologize.  Wolf Hall is stunning; it dominated my life for the 48 hours it took me to read it.  The novel every bit earns the adjective "consuming."  Hilary Mantel's writing is so readable, and her organization of this massive tale so masterful, that any non-laudatory comment about Wolf Hall seems ungrateful.  But - call me ungrateful - I was mildly unsatisfied at its end.  If the problem is me, though, it's not because I'm Tudor-ed out.  Like all proper Americans, I lack formal education in history.

One reason for the let-down is undoubtedly the build up.  Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize in 2009.  In The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Benfey calls it "dazzling," while Janet Maslin describes the "book's main characters . . . [as] scorchingly well rendered."  Stephen Greenblatt, writing in The New York Review of Books, sums up Wolf Hall as "a startling achievement, a brilliant historical novel."

But my sense of let-down wasn't merely a function of expectations raised to unfairly vertiginous heights.  Wolf Hall let me down in respect of one reasonable expectation that Stephen Greenblatt elucidates in his NYRB review:

The historical novel . . . . offers the dream of full access, access to what went on behind closed doors, off the record, in private, when no one was listening or recording.  The great realizations of this dream . . . provide a powerful hallucination of presence, the vivid sensation of lived life.  They set the dead in motion and make them speak.

"Historical novels," Greenblatt adds, "generate a sense in the reader best summed up by exclamations like 'Yes, this is the way it must have been.'"

My sense of let-down with Wolf Hall goes exactly to Greenblatt's point: I kept thinking, It couldn't have been this way.

Yes, yes, I have already admitted that I have no formal history education.  How the hell would I know what it must have been like?  A valid objection, I agree.  But the reason I kept getting jolted out of my suspension of disbelief was the dialogue.  Without exception, the dialogue was relentlessly witty.  Too often, dialogue seemed to be either a laugh, a set-up to a laugh, or a set-up to a set-up.  For example, here is Thomas Cromwell speaking to his boss, Cardinal Wolsey:

The servants efface themselves, melting away towards the door.  "What else would you like?" the cardinal says.
"The sun to come out?"
"So late?  You tax my powers."
"Dawn would do."
The cardinal inclines his head to the servants.  "I shall see to this request myself," he says gravely; and gravely they murmur, and withdraw.

(p. 19.)  Here, in another example, is Cromwell speaking with his wife, Liz:

"You're sweeter to look at than the cardinal," he says.
"That's the smallest compliment a woman ever received."
"And I've been working on it all the way from Yorkshire."

(p. 35.)  The only people who so consistently talk that way are in sit-coms.  And even I know that they didn't have sit-coms in the court of Henry VIII.

And, at the risk of appearing really ungrateful, let me elaborate on my complaint by saying, the wit was clearly that of Hilary Mantel; hers is an admirable wit - one that entertains and enchants - but I often felt that the characters were deprived of individual voices.  Is that his sister Kat, his wife Anne or his sister-in-law Johane quipping?  Is that his nephew Richard, his clerk Rafe or his servant Christopher - or for that matter Kat, Anne or Johane - wise-cracking?  To my ear, they all possess the same interchangeable humor.  For instance:

"You'll make the magistrates' bench for sure . . . with your close study of the difference between a corpse and my brother."  (Kat)

"Heaven direct me: boy or hedgehog?" (Liz)

The dialogue is, in fact, tremendously fun to read, and the moments were many when I was smiling or even laughing out loud.  ("Tweet tweet," to those of you who have read the book, left me guffawing.)  

Nonetheless, just as historical characters depicted in movies are always better looking than they'd been in life, the dialogue in Wolf Hall didn't strike me as 16th century speech "the way it must have been.'"  Hilary Mantel may have "set the dead in motion and ma[d]e them speak," but she made them speak like the hippest, sexiest, funniest, most modern, Platonic ideal versions of themselves.

And for that, I'm just a little bit sorry.

(Image of Hilary Mantel from The New York Times)