Public's favourite snaps up Booker Prize

Published on Tuesday 6 October 2009 21:58

HILARY Mantel's historical novel Wolf Hall last night won the Man Booker Prize, to the delight of booklovers – and the despair of bookies, who now face making a record pay-out.

Although she has never won a major British literary award, Mantel was the public's overwhelming favourite to win the 50,000 award. About 90 per cent of the bets made on this year's competition have been for Wolf Hall which tells the story of Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation.

Broadcaster James Naughtie, chairman of the judges, last night denied his panel's decision – which was made by three votes to two in a secret ballot – was in any way influenced by the hype or the bookies' odds.

He said. "We were just bowled over by the sheer bigness and boldness of the book and its narrative. It's a contemporary novel that just happens to be set in the 16th century."

The Man Booker Prize has often picked winners from the fringes of the Commonwealth – Australia, Canada, India and South Africa – ahead of British writers. This year all that changed, with four of the shortlisted candidates being English and episodes in English history forming the background for four out of the six novels.

Wolf Hall tells of how Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith's son, rose to become the most powerful man in the land apart from the monarch he served, and how he helped Henry VIII to tear the nation away from Catholicism.

This is the 500th anniversary of the accession of Henry VIII – Mantel always aimed to publish her book in time for the celebrations of the event, in July. She is working on a sequel, which may be published the year after next.

Any historian knows that the main difficulty in writing about revolutions such as this lies in keeping a narrative thread running throughout.

For Mantel, this just doesn't seem to be a problem. Her storytelling makes the complicated clear.

But she does something else. In most fiction about the English Reformation, Thomas Cromwell is the principal villain, the bigoted pragmatist who bumped off saintly, wise Sir Thomas More – as in A Man For All Seasons.

Mantel almost turns this notion on its head, so clever and quick-witted is her Cromwell. "Lock Cromwell in a dungeon in the morning," says one character, "and when you come back that night, he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money."

Mantel doesn't just make this believable. She makes it literature, too.

Refreshing, unshowy take on history

CRITICS can sometimes get a bit sniffy about historical fiction. All that iffy dialogue. All that predictable plot. They don't call it "the dead hand of history" for no reason.

Yet Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is so brilliant that it overturns all of those prejudices.

Even if you're resistant to Sunday-night Tudor TV costume dramas, even if you think Mantel's subject, Thomas Cromwell (Henry VIII's right-hand man), is too English, too distant in the past to mean anything to you, you should give it a chance.

Why? Because she brings the past to life so perfectly.

In Wolf Hall, you don't just get the sights and smells of life at court, but you pick up on the ideas of the time. You catch a sense of the new Protestant faith coming in from the Netherlands – a revolutionary faith that says that Man can talk to God direct.

Mantel shows why people were prepared to watch their flesh blacken in flames rather than give up this new faith. She shows what it must have been like to spread the word about it when anyone you tried to tell could turn you over to the executioner.

Cromwell bestrides such uncertainties with ease. Every day at court he faces worse ones – the whims of his monster-king who wants to turn England inside out in order to remarry.

But Mantel does something even more than this. She takes a Machiavellian figure ("think Alastair Campbell with an axe," says Tudor expert David Starkey) reviled in history and literature ever since his death in 1540, gets inside his mind and shows us the world he saw.

Then, because she does that in writing that is unshowy and fresh, she gets inside our minds too. A wonderful winner.

David Robinson