"But the trouble is, maps are always last year's. England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces as a spine of hills into the mist."
Reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall has been a singular pleasure this past month, a pleasure savored slowly as if this book and I were having an extended conversation that would ebb and flow, but which always remained engaging and often thought provoking.
I only began the novel in early April, after it languished on my reading list for some years. What kept me from beginning? Surely had I known how thoroughly engaging I have found the book, I would have started sooner. Or perhaps not. Perhaps this was the right time. It was Masterpiece that prompted me to pick up the book; I watched the first episode of the mini-series and realized the entire production was too dark for me to watch while knitting. I watched, and although I enjoyed that first episode, I also recognized that I was far more likely to enjoy time spent raptly enthralled by a book than by any film or television production. No judgment intended; it is simply the way my brain is wired.
And it was a good read. It did not go slowly because it was a difficult read, indeed it was not, but because I have been of a mind to read to slowly, to engage, and this engagement suited both myself and the multi-layered and multi-faceted nuances of this novel which is rich with detail, rich with the both the subtlety and complexity that makes its characters all so human.
Of course those characterizations also mark these characters, this Tudor England, as simultaneously far too close to home and far to distant from the way we prefer to imagine it. I finished the book early in May, and I have had time to read the reviews of readers on Amazon, on Goodreads, etc. They have not really changed my perceptions at all other than to point out how invested we are in our own shifting sands of perception, the shifting sands of our view of history and our view of our place in the world.
Mantel's novel is told from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, a man who is not the golden boy in popular perceptions of the period. But perhaps this is at least in part because he is so hard to pin down, and we like our heroes to be heroic and our villains to be villainous. Thomas More took a stand, has become a saint. We expect our saints to be saintly, it is easier that way, if the saints are all good and the villains are not, preferably are not good at all. But who is a saint and who is a villain, and is it within human comprehension to parse out the differences? Or is it possible, God forbid, that each of us has the potential to be one or the other? Or both? Or neither? That is not so neat either.
I enjoyed this book simply because it was not simple, because it captures the complexities of history, of human nature, and the way we react, or fail to react, to the circumstances in which we live. I like the book because it does all this and tells a story and tells a story well. I like the book because there is so much more there, if you allow yourself to have that conversation, the conversation the author wants to have with the reader.
"He knows different now. It's the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumor that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn't enough for him to take Bilney's life away; he had to take his death too."
Both of these quotes are from the very end of the book. I read it on my Kindle and I do not have the page numbers. But there are others that I wish I could share, other things I could say about this book, other things I might say on a different day. I finished this book over 10 days ago, and my perceptions have shifted with time. I wrote some notes in my journal, notes that are currently spread out upon my desk, virtually illegible, the victims of an accident involving a dog, a cat, and an upturned vase of Mother's Day flowers. Such are the risks incurred with the use of a fountain pen, and paper, and anything, in fact, which is impermanent in life. Would I have written the same post 9 days ago? Probably not. Would this be the review I would write, were I writing it tomorrow instead of today? Probably not. The next time I read this book, will my perceptions remain the same? Undoubtedly not.
We constantly rewrite our history, our stories, ourselves. We might tell ourselves that we do not, or that our revisions are only in the name of "truth", but history, given the chance, might prove us wrong. As for my lost words, now existing as but a blur on rippled paper scattered across my desk, do they matter, except as a reminder of the shifting sands of my own engagement with the world? Probably not.
I suspect Thomas Cromwell would approve. Or at least Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell would approve.