One of the rare negative reviews of 2009’s Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall , the first in the late Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels offering a sympathetic take on the rise and fall of Henry VIII’s right-hand man Thomas Cromwell, came from critic Susan Bassnett. Writing in Times Higher Education , Bassnett said: “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.
” I have to say, I’m with Bassnett on this one. Mantel’s piling on of minuscule detail after minuscule detail eventually defeated me. I just couldn’t warm to Wolf Hall and abandoned it after about 150 pages.
To be fair, I was probably spoiled by having first watched writer Peter Straughan and director Peter Kosminsky’s superb 2015 TV version, which miraculously compressed the first and second book of the trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies , into six hours of addictive, immaculately crafted drama. A decade later, Straughan and Kosminsky wrap the story up with Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (BBC1, Sunday, November 10), based on the final book, covering the last four years of Cromwell’s life. A lot has happened since the last time we were at the court of King Henry VIII (Damian Lewis, once again a wonderfully menacing presence).
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light | Trailer Mantel died in 2022. Naturally, many of the returning cast, including Mark Rylance as Cromwell, have noticeably aged – although Thomas Brodie.