Why Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy makes for the perfect lockdown read

Pre-pandemic, we read on airplanes and in airports, on train or cab rides to work, we read in that quiet hour you snuck in between work and well, more work, and we piled our big reads for holidays and vacations. The love of a great big book was just too heavy to lug around town, and so novellas, short stories and slimmer novels just made for easier carriage and healthier backs. For those of us privileged to be tucked away in our homes, even as Zoom calls and headlines and house work mount, we still find ourselves with a bit more unscheduled time and a dull yearning to escape from the new reality of social distancing, lockdowns and the tragic spread of the pandemic we find ourselves in.  

At a time when we’re looking for shows that we can binge on for days and books that can keep us company for weeks, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy makes for a strong candidate. In this three-part series, Mantel traces the life and times of Thomas Cromwell from his humble beginnings to his rise to power in King Henry VIII’s court to his ultimate death by execution. Through Wolf Hall, Bring Up The Bodies and the last and final, recently released instalment, The Mirror and The Light (all HarperCollins, Fourth Estate) clocking in at about 2,000 pages, is an immediate reminder of the power of a completely immersive read. One of the most anticipated releases of the year, while Mantel’s tour might have been cancelled because of the COVID-19 outbreak and deliveries might be stalled, her books are all here, just a click away and available to read on your Kindle.  

Joining the classic and cult ranks of Tolkien’s fantastical The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Amitav Ghosh’s The Ibis Trilogy, Margaret Atwood’s The MaddAddam Trilogy or the racier Bourne Trilogy by Robert Ludlum—Mantel has already made Thomas Cromwell a household name. It began with the popular and critical success of her first two books (both of which won the Booker, making Mantel the first woman to win the prize twice) and was sealed when they were adapted into a TV series starring Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis, and then on stage as a Tony-award-winning show on Broadway and West End. 

But there’s more to this tale than awards and laurels. Covering the first half of the 1500s, plunge into the ultimate Tudor saga—of how it all came to be through its epic and tragic hero between the beheadings, hidden romances, scandal and intrigue. And lose yourself in the deceptions and betrayals within and outside of the English court, deftly captured and reimagined by Mantel. Mantel is telling a story that we know from history, there are no spoiler alerts here, we know the tragic hero will be executed, we know the Reformation will happen, but it is in her storytelling that she keeps us hooked page after page. She refers to her source material as the “central grounds of Englishness”. And it is a definitive period of British history, but she frees it from the confines of identity and politics, instead making it a story of men and women, and power and humanity.  

Cromwell is at once relatable and repugnant, a boy beaten by his father to a man beaten by his king. King Henry VIII is impulsive and insecure, reeling between his roles as man and king. Mantel infuses history not with analogies to present day, but with a rich inner world of complex lives. Unlike most writers of historical fiction, she has consistently rejected parallels with the past and contemporary, and has been quoted as saying, “People are constantly asking me if the Reformation is like Brexit and the answer is no.” And in turn, King Henry VIII is not Donald Trump. And this frees her storytelling and absorbs you right in, transporting you to another time, even as it remains familiar to the ways of now.  

Her art meanders in seamlessly, each sentence is crafted deliciously, she has after all spent the last 15 years writing this magnum opus. And she exploits the length allowed through three books, creating a dense and reflective landscape of characters and histories. And as a reader, you get to indulge in one of the great joys of cutting off from the troubled world outside and completely immersing yourself into another.  

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