Malinda Lo
Blog
Dec 8, 2010
On reading (part of) “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel
The fourth and final novel I resolved to read in 2010 was Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2009.
Well, after making it through the first hundred pages, I decided to stop trying to read this book. For a while I felt like I should just keep going because I had resolved to read it, but ultimately I had to be honest with myself. The idea of continuing to read just did not appeal to me at all.
Some books just don’t fit with some readers. In Wolf Hall, I found a book that simply didn’t speak to me. That doesn’t mean that the book is poorly written. It just means that I’m not the right audience for that book.
I’ve found, in general, that I often can’t connect with books that are about (a) older men; (b) politics; or (c) are written in very literary styles. Wolf Hall pretty much hits all three of these qualities that usually leave me cold, so I shouldn’t really be surprised that I didn’t find it gripping.
I was surprised — and often confused — by Hilary Mantel’s usage of pronouns in this book. She writes in third person present tense, but generally identifies the main character, Thomas Cromwell, with the pronoun he — without distinguishing between him, Cromwell, and other men in the book. It also seemed like half the men were named Thomas (which one of the characters even notes, wryly). The result is that there is a plethora of he‘s, but I had a very hard time figuring out just who he was.
I read a number of reviews of Wolf Hall in which this technique was described as a unique and even revolutionary way of writing very close third person. Mantel’s choice of technique allows the reader to feel as though the book was written in first person … except with a tiny smidgen of distance provided by the third person. I can see that this is an interesting choice, but it’s a huge risk to take. I know that many readers of Wolf Hall were confused by her choice (you can just google the reviews to find them), and I think this kind of purposefully difficult style is something usually only attempted by writers of literary fiction.
That’s one of the main reasons I often can’t connect with literary fiction. It seems to be so self-consciously concerned with style — to the detriment of story.
I’m not saying that Wolf Hall lacks story, necessarily. So many books, plays, and films have been written and produced about the Tudors! There’s loads of story there. However, I’m not a Tudor enthusiast, and combined with the confusing pronouns and my own lack of interest in literary novels about men in politics, I’m afraid that spelled the death knell for my reading of Wolf Hall.
After I decided to stop reading, I did think for a while about challenging myself to read outside my comfort zone. Was I just giving up on a challenging book? But … I don’t think that Wolf Hall was actually outside of my comfort zone; I just found it kind of boring. The pronouns, yes, were challenging, but from a technical point of view. I could have forged onward if I had been interested in the story. Unfortunately, I wasn’t.
Have you read Wolf Hall? What did you think of Mantel’s usage of pronouns? What makes a book challenging for you? And when do you decide to stop reading?
I actually enjoyed WOLF HALL, although it took me about 10 years to read it (I exaggerate, but not by much). I had many of the same problems you did: confusing pronouns and choice of tense. I’m not a fan of third person present; I rarely think it works, although I felt this was better than other offerings.
I have a weird relationship with literary fiction because when it’s done well, I love it above all things. (Like THE BOOK THIEF. But even THE BOOK THIEF took me about 50 pages to get over the fact that Death narrates.) But often it comes across as being too self-consciously “Look at how technically ‘good’ I can write” with no substance to back it up. They are usually relentlessly about the writer (who is also usually white, privileged, and male) and feels rather masturbatory (to me).
A book is challenging for me if I find I don’t care. I don’t have to care about the main characters, but I still have to care about what happens. For instance, I didn’t actually care much for the people in WOLF HALL, yet I found the politics of the time interesting enough to finish. On the other hand, I just didn’t care about Franzen’s ordinarily dysfunctional Midwestern families or their problems, so I couldn’t finish either THE CORRECTIONS or FREEDOM.
Some of my favorite novels are “literary,” too, but I think the “literary” label is usually only slapped on them after they become critical successes. Interestingly, I really like experimental stylings in nonfiction, especially creative nonfiction and memoir. I’m a big fan of it there, but not in fiction. I don’t know why I like it in one but not in the other.
And there is the odd literary novel that is very, very stylistically self-conscious, yet I love it totally. Like Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. It is hard to find a more literary novel, but it totally killed me.
I love Tudor fiction, so this has been on my list for awhile. I’ve been put off, though, by the style, which I’ve heard described as self-conscious so often it’s very nearly scared me off. I agree, I love literary fiction that isn’t quite literary fiction. Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler come to mind – all not quite literary, but they’ve been so successful and well-loved it’s a label tacked on. The example of The Book Thief is a good one, too.
It took me ages to get through “Wolf Hall” also, but I persevered (same with the Franzen tomes, with equal disappointment). And I agree with your assessment of why one might find it dull (about older men! and power!). But, written by a woman and Booker Prize winner? Eh. I have an internal lecture about why novels should be no longer than 200 pages (and songs not more than four minutes), but there are plenty of classics that prove me wrong. I just don’t think this is one of them.
I think my main problem with a lot of literary fiction is that it places story right at the bottom of its list of priorities, with characters somewhere in the middle, and style way up at the top. To me, you can be as experimental and edgy as you want so long as it serves the story. If second person past tense with an alternating non-linear plot makes your story sing, then fine. But if you’re just writing the book that way to show that you can, and it cripples the reader’s ability to immerse themselves in the story, then I don’t care how literary you are – you’ve failed as a writer. Every other kind of writing acknowledges this, but litfic rejects it.
In litfic, what seems to have happened is that writers and critics have mixed up story with plot. And literary writers on the whole are horrified to think that they serve anything as pedestrian as a plot. For some reason, the very word ‘plot’ seems to have acquired all these pulp-fictiony connotations, and in order to garner real kudos a writer must eschew any attempt at creating a plot at all. Which means that half the time when you finish a literary book, you get the feeling that it wasn’t a coherant narrative at all. I wish that literary fiction as a whole would embrace storytelling again, as an art and a craft. I think this, combined with a concern for style and characters, would make for some amazing fiction.
*End Rant*
Thank you, Malinda, for writing this post. I haven’t read Wolf Hall but I am in the middle of a novel which I have often considered putting down (Vernon God Little) because it’s caharcters and plot don’t interest me much (teenage boys, school gun violence, small town ignorance)–and I’ve been feeling guilty about putting it down!
But, it has been the storytelling of it that has kept me with it thus far, each time I get ready to putit down I realise another way in which the story itself is developing in its telling and then I’m intrigued. I had never thought about the difference in fiction before between plot and storytelling before, Zoe, so that’s was really illuminating as well! A narrative poet, I’m obsessed with ‘how to tell a story’ and get a lot of ‘well, if you want to tell a story, than why not fiction’. I think the answer is in the fact that I haven’t seen a lot of novels that comes from a love of storytelling. ( Of course there but if we’re speaking generally…).
There were some articles about how Hilary Mantel’s previous books were sometimes dismissed as “domestic,” but with Wolf Hall, even though there were certainly domestic scenes in it, she got all this acclaim. Maybe because it was about a man?
I totally agree with you!
I don’t come across many narrative poets in my life, so it’s nice to meet you (virtually). I wonder, do you read mostly literary fiction? I find story in a lot of fiction, but often less so in literary fiction. Sometimes genre novels prioritize plot over character, which can be just as detrimental to storytelling as prioritizing style over plot. I think a good story needs to have all those elements working in harmony.
I enjoyed Wolf Hall in many ways. I read it fast, I was right there…
…and yet:
a) I don’t remember much about it, apart from one or two brilliant images, because on some level I didn’t care that deeply–though I was intellectually engaged
b) the POV distracted me at the most inopportune times
I think there are many better–cleaner, simpler, easier for the reader, and just as effective–ways to achieve what I take to be Mantel’s objective: immersion in the world and the character. So, yep, that pissed me off.
Still, I’ll be buying the next one when it comes out, and I’ve already bought a couple of her other novels. So I’m not entirely what that all adds up to
I really enjoyed this book a lot. While I occasionally found the numerous characters and the many Thomases a challenge, it was outweighed by my interest in the time period. I’ve read a lot about the Tudors, and usually from the perspective of Henry or one of the wives. I thought that the use of Cromwell as main character was a wonderful new take, and it opened my eyes to the lives of more ordinary Brittons during the period. I suppose were I not a big fan of historical fiction in general or this time period in particular, I would have found it less interesting.
I so agree with much of what you said. Of course, much of this goes back to what we, the readers (and really, I mean what “they, the critics”) define as literary fiction. My general definition has to do with a novel having “substance”-which is in direct contradiction to “style” when the two are put together, such as the phrase “style over substance”. While I find new literary devices and narrative structures intriguing, I am much more likely to think of a novel as literary if it portrays some part of the human experience that allows me greater understanding of life, love, death, pain, grief, joy, etc….If a novelist can create that with clever narrative style, great. But just plain old good writing will usually do for me.
I think that if I knew more about the Tudors and/or were more interested in them, I would have stuck with the book. But, even The Tudors on Showtime failed to suck me in (!!), so I think that period just doesn’t do it for me.