I was supposed to write another footnote for Where Angels Fear to Tread. But then I also wanted to review Wolf Hall before I forgot everything I had to say about it, and before A Victorian Celebration takes off for real next week. Wolf Hall won, so you get this lengthy review today.
Reading Expectations & Reality
Let me begin by saying that, before starting to read, I wanted both to love this book and to hate it. I wanted to love it because I had heard good stuff about it from people I like and because "hello, new favorite!" is pretty much my favorite thing to say. I wanted to hate it because I had heard bad stuff about it from other people I like - Alexis among them - and because part of me always longs to say, "I knew this book couldn't be that good!" about popular books of the day. (Yes, now that you ask, my personality is best described as a cross between squeeing fangirl and crotchety old lady.)
Convoluted reading aspirations aside, I had mixed feelings about Wolf Hall up to the very end. This book centered on a period I like (because I have an interest in pre-18th century stuff), but don't know that much about (because my interest fades the closer you get to the 1500s). Still, what I knew made it a little hard for me to suspend disbelief in the first half of the book. I kept thinking that something is not right about the way they speak, that some phrases are too modern. It wasn't anything obvious, more an undercurrent, the hint that Mantel's dialogue and the language I knew from the texts were informed by different sensibilities. I had the constant urge to run things through Google Books and see if they were really used like that in that period (not that it would have helped much, since the written and spoken usages could well be different).