18th February 2013
Present: Mark, Jen, Gill, Nic.
Well, good wife Gill has, uncharacteristically for a woman of Henry's reign, thrown down the gauntlet and what a challenge it is. This has to be a firm favourite for most apt venue of the year. We dined at the Wharf of the Tower of London, through which Ann probably passed, where Thomas had been so often, on ground that probably had shaken beneath Henry's feet and, returning to earth, we drank beer out of jugs and goblets, bathed in candle light!
So I had to send my food back. So we'd probably never return. So what, I ask you? I was looking at Tower Bridge as I waited for my replacement meal to arrive!
Mark, Gill and I had finished and loved this book. Jen was enjoying it but was preoccupied by the number of characters and compelled to keep flicking to the frightening list of dramatis personae and selection of maps at the opening of the book, unhelped by the fact that she had not read the Woolf Hall, the first in this series. Ignore it, was our advice. The main players are so clearly written and so well-formed that, over the course of the book, you get to know and identify them and build up a full picture of them without this and, if a character is so minor that you cannot place them, their story little matters. Relax, enjoy.
This is a huge novel but is only physically weighty: the writing is adept and flowing and the plot marches along with a reassuring rhythm - slow enough that one can take everything in, pacy enough that you keep on turning the page. We could (and did) find faults but they were nit-picky and in no way marred the experience of this tremendous read. We liked Mantel's way of referencing Cromwell as He - she did it in the first book and it worked. We disliked the fact that she seemed to lose faith this time, using "He, Cromwell," too often - the context always indicated who it was and it felt heavy-handed. A small gripe indeed.
Thomas is more majestic that Henry: calm, deliberate, hard, mean, determined, loving, romantic, giving and gentle in turn; always in control. As Kipling could have written about Thomas: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you ...". Many did and it was often his fault. As to Thomas keeping his head ... well, that is book three and we cannot wait to read it albeit the anticipation is marred by the knowledge that there cannot be a fourth.