Publishers’ Weekly has come out with its list of the ten best books of 2009. The fact that not one of the authors managed to be a woman would in itself require PW to do some energetic tap-dancing, but the fact that the single best book of the year has been written by a woman named Hilary Mantel is what emphasizes PW’s risible ignorance. And it’s not like Mantel’s novel, Wolf Hall, is some obscure, twee literary exercise; it’s a big, robust novel set in Tudor England, and it just won the prestigious Man Booker Prize.
During a decade when books and films and TV shows about Henry VIII are almost as common as vampire stories, Mantel pulled off the most remarkable coup and found a new way to tell the tale. She focused her tale on Thomas Cromwell, who in all other stories is a minor functionary who does the bidding of the monarch. Mantel takes Cromwell and makes him a new man in a new age–a commoner, a Protestant, a man whose power comes not from ancient titles but a knowledge of new forces–the law, the emerging global economy, spreading literacy. Mantel’s Cromwell is a thoroughly contemporary character, the sort of wise and resourceful and if necessary ruthless man we see nowadays sitting on boards and advising presidents and hopefully saving the world from self-destruction. It’s interesting that Cromwell’s adversary here is a man who in most other tellings of this tale is a hero, that Man for All Seasons Sir Thomas More. Mantel’s More is religious zealot who is tied to Rome and to a set of beliefs in furtherance of which he ordered torture and execution; a fundamentalist and an ascetic set against Cromwell’s modernist, curious, man of the world. And not only does Mantel do a terrific job reimagining the tale, she tells it brilliantly, with language that immerses you in the story, and a kind of urgent, sometimes eliptical construction that kind of makes you lean in closer to follow what’s happening.
Mantel says she is working on a sequel, but that right now all she has is a box of notes. Ms. Mantel, I am waiting.