Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I read this book a few years ago shortly after it won the Booker Prize.  I'm taking a short break from reading them, because most of the ones I've picked up lately, while good stories, seem to have some form of child abuse or neglect as the main story-line.  As I have a young child and there is another on the way,  I doing some "lighter" reading at the moment. This may be of interest to some.  An article about how to spot bad books: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=418955

That being said, Wolf Hall does open with the main character, a 15-year-old boy, who will grow up to be Thomas Cromwell, being beaten to a pulp, before he runs away.  However, at least this character is somewhat in charge if his own destiny, unlike some of the past titles I've read recently, where once a mistake or tragedy happens the main character is forever affected by it.  We as readers, or at least I personally, don't completely like Cromwell, but I do feel like we have a  good understanding of what makes him tick and why he does what he does in his rise to power as one of Henry VIII's most trusted advisers.

Interestingly enough, in the article that I refer to above, one of the contributors mentions Wolf Hall as a very bad book.   Says Susan Bassnett, from the University of Warwick,
"High on my list of Really Bad Books are two best-sellers: Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, both of which I rate as dreadfully badly written. Brown wrote to a computer game formula: solve one level and move on to the next, whereas Mantel just wrote and wrote and wrote. I have yet to meet anyone outside the Booker panel who managed to get to the end of this tedious tome. God forbid there might be a sequel, which I fear is on the horizon."

I think Bassnet is being overly harsh... I don't think Wolf Hall was that bad.  It was a bit long, and it is not the Tudors (TV series of recent years) by any means... some people may like that about the book.  However, I thought it was worth reading.  Interestingly enough that same year I did read Hilary Mantel's much shorter An Experiment in Love.  As I now live in the north of England where many of the flashback scene's take place, I did find it very evocative of a certain time and place, though for the life of me I still didn't understand the meaning of the title.  An Experiment in Love centers on the first year of two female students in 1970 (the first in their respective families to undertake university degrees).  As in Wolf Hall, I think Mantel is very good a creating scenes and interactions between her characters, but again, I didn't completely like them as people, although I felt like I had a good understanding of what was going in their heads.