So much of what I've been reading these days has been either academics books for a class I'm taking for work, or Star Wars books (next big post coming soon, y'all!). Individually, some of those books have been illuminating, or useful, or deep and cheesy fun (Kathy Tyers is better than anyone else writing in the Extended Universe at generating non-embarrassing sexual heat between her characters). But collectively, they've left me ravenous for good prose. And so it was with that lean and hungry feeling that I tore into Wolf Hall late last week, wrapping it up on the porch this weekend.
It's a marvelous, ingeniously constructed and deeply felt work and I highly recommend it. But I don't want to talk about that, or about my Elizabeth I fixation, or about the fight over Thomas Cromwell's reputation (I would be extremely curious to see someone do a book like The Daughter of Time on all of this). Instead, I want to talk about the prose, something that's going to necessitate a diversion.
I read Angels in America at an extraordinarily influential time in my life, about which I have long intended to write a post, but for now let me say it left me with a strong preference for sentences that are...baroque, ornate, those aren't quite the write words, but sprawling, urgent, stuffed because there is so much feeling and so many ideas behind them. Joan Didon's clipped sentences with sprawling construction sometimes pulled me back into the possibility of constraint. But my brain has moved to the rhythm of Tony Kushner's prose for many, many years now. I have none of his brilliance, but often feel a great deal of urgency and impatience.
But God, Hilary Mantel's prose. My God, people. "He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury....He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. he will take a bet on anything." It's almost a platonic version of a list, one that should be taught alongside The Things They Carried, a marvelous guide to manhood. "It's not the hand of God kills our children. It's disease and hunger and war, rat bites and bad air and the miasma from the plague pits; it's bad harvests like the harvest this year and last year; it's careless nurses." Brutal, plain and effective. "Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes. At an earlier stage in life this would have surprised him; he had thought that under their clothes people wore their skin." Counterintuitive ideas, simple prose. It's an unforgettable idea that rattles around in the brain, changes the way one's random gaze lands. "From this marriage--Fifth Henry and the Glass Princess--sprung another Henry who ruled an England dark as winter, cold, barren, calamitous." Perhaps it's just my susceptibility to myths, but it's a fairytale in a single sentence. "He never saw the future again, not clearly as he had that year." An burst of magic, and of fate, into the everyday occurrences where we can notice them.
And that's just a few of the passages, working through the list, that caught my eye. It makes me want to dream in concise and perfect phrases, to value every one of them and not just the chains made by linking them together.
In a way, Wolf Hall is a good companion volume to Possession. One is more about Melusina than another, the former about the state, the latter about private persons, but both dedicated wholly to matters of the heart. And to England. I wrote at one point when I was about halfway through that Wolf Hall was like reading fireworks. It's like that, but it's a vast, intelligent construction, too: like Ellen Ash's journal in Possession, Wolf Hall is a delicious exercise in bafflement, in misdirection. I'll have to read it again, and soon, to fully absorb Mantel's accomplishment. And hope that she finishes her sequel soon, and with as great skill.