Hilary Mantel wins the Booker Prize with her novel on Thomas Cromwell "Wolf Hall".
Hilary Mantel is one of the most highly regarded and under-rewarded – in terms of prizes – novelists working in Britain today, and it surprised many that this was her first time on the Booker shortlist. She admitted to the Guardian this week that winning "would provide freedom from having to win the Booker". She is the author of eleven books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Giving Up the Ghost, and, most recently, Beyond Black, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize.
After winning the prize, she said: "I hesitated for such a long time before beginning to write this book, actually for about 20 years." She said that if winning the Booker Prize was like being in a train crash "at this moment I am happily flying through the air".
According to The Guardian, the five-judge panel was split this year 3 to 2 in favor of “Wolf Hall.” James Naughtie, the chairman of the judge’s panel, said: “Our decision was based on the sheer bigness of the book, the boldness of its narrative and scene-setting, the gleam that there is in its detail.”
The New York Times says that the book’s “main characters are scorchingly well rendered, and their sharp-clawed machinations are presented with nonstop verve in a book that can compress a wealth of incisiveness into a very few well-chosen words.” And in The Sunday Telegraph in London, Lucy Hughes-Hallett wrote that Mantel “makes that world at once so concrete you can smell the rain-drenched wool cloaks and feel the sharp fibres of the rushes underfoot.”
A taste of the book: Wolf Hall explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.
'Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,' says Thomas More, 'and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.'
England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.
