Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel depicts an outsider at Henry VIII’s court in ‘Wolf Hall’

Booker win boosts Tudor page-turner ‘Wolf Hall’

LONDON — Last week, Hilary Mantel was a critically praised but commercially lukewarm novelist, whose Tudor corridors-of-power saga “Wolf Hall” was receiving rave reviews for its vivid depiction of 16th-century England.

Then she won the Booker Prize, the career-changing literary award that attracts attention from bookies and bookstores alike. Overnight, she shot up best-seller lists in Britain and the United States.

Now, says a bemused Mantel, “I’m chasing Sarah Palin on Amazon.”

The $82,000 prize is a huge boost for a book that turns the historical figure of Thomas Cromwell — Henry VIII’s shadowy political fixer — into a compelling, complex literary hero. Cromwell was an architect of the Reformation who helped the king realize his desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Vatican’s refusal to annul Henry’s first marriage led the monarch to reject the authority of the pope and install himself as head of the Church of England.

Henry’s reign has inspired fictional treatments from the acclaimed play and film “A Man for All Seasons” to the soapy TV series “The Tudors.” It’s a dramatic era that saw England transformed from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant nation, from medieval kingdom to emerging modern state.

“It’s one of those periods of history that is so good you couldn’t make it up, really,” Mantel said.

“I think it’s the parade of the archetypes. We’ve all known people like these. We’ve all known some kind of saintly wife like Catherine of Aragon, whose career is wife as well as queen and who will hang on to a dead marriage. We’ve all known someone like Anne Boleyn, the mistress on the make. We’ve all known men like Henry — clinging onto his youth, denying that he’s getting fat, denying that he’s going bald.”

Mantel’s Cromwell more than holds his own against these larger-than-life figures. One of history’s great self-made men, he left home at 15 and fought as a mercenary in the French army before learning the workings of Italian banks and Low Countries cloth markets. When he returned to England, he became a prosperous lawyer and finally a powerful political player.

Mantel said Cromwell is fascinating because he went from “blacksmith’s son to Earl of Essex, in this incredibly rigid, stratified, hierarchical society.”

How did he do it?

“I think it’s the kind of story that’s just got a universal quality about it,” she said. “He’s the boy who leaves home and can’t go back. He’s got to go forward. You find those people in every society, at every time. And some of them are smarter and harder than the rest, and they break through.”

Sitting in her agent’s London office less than 48 hours after the Booker win, 57-year-old Mantel is sleep-deprived but still buzzing. She says she’s “taking it half an hour at a time.”

A softly spoken former social worker and film critic, Mantel has written novels, short stories and the memoir “Giving Up the Ghost”— which chronicled years of ill-health, including the undiagnosed endometriosis that left her infertile. She has said the years of illness wrecked her dream of becoming a lawyer but made her a writer.

Her novels range widely in subject, from “Eight Months on Gazzah Street,” set in Saudi Arabia, to the French Revolution saga “A Place of Greater Safety.”

Jack Macrea, Mantel’s editor at publisher Henry Holt in New York, said her strength as a writer was “the ability to imagine the situation in such a profound manner, which not only gives the reader a feeling for being there, but being a participant in the whole situation.”

“It draws you right in,” he said. “It simply sings with truth, whether one has any knowledge of the Tudor period or not.”

“Wolf Hall” combines a convincing sense of the sights and sounds of Tudor London with a very modern sense of immediacy. James Naughtie, chairman of the Booker Prize judges, called it “a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century.”

That modern tone comes partly from Mantel’s decision to tell the story in the present tense — and in language free from cliches — and partly from the figure of Cromwell himself.

A model civil servant, he champions efficiency and merit over tradition and privilege. He is frustrated by Henry’s aristocratic advisers, who fail to grasp that the world is run “not from castle walls but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus.”

Mantel said Cromwell is “a man who understands money.”

“I think it was an era when a lot of people understood the counting of the cash, but few people understood the banking system — which was already quite complex — and the way financial muscle underlies everything.”

That hardheaded savvy has left Cromwell with an image as a ruthless, Machiavellian manipulator. His sinister reputation was reinforced by Cromwell’s villainous depiction in “A Man for All Seasons,” Robert Bolt’s 1960s play about statesman and Catholic saint Thomas More, who was executed for treason after falling foul of Henry.

Mantel says she stuck closely to the historical record for her account, but is happy to challenge received wisdom.

In “Wolf Hall,” More is a prudish bully who persecutes heretics with what Mantel calls “unsavory” enthusiasm.

Cromwell, in contrast, emerges as pragmatic, charismatic — and likable.

“If the reader likes him I am happy, because I like him,” Mantel said. “That’s not what I expected, though. I started off thinking, ‘He’s bad, but he’s fascinating.’ I did find to my surprise some … engaging qualities in him, which are absent from most historians’ accounts.”

Mantel is now working on a sequel that will chart Anne Boleyn’s fall from favor and Cromwell’s continuing rise.

Those who have studied history, read Shakespeare or even watched “The Tudors” will know how Anne and Cromwell’s stories end. But Mantel hopes they will be swept along by the narrative anyway.

“I’m very keen on the idea that a historical novel should be written pointing forward,” she said. “Remember that the people you are following didn’t know the end of their own story. So they were going forward day by day, pushed and jostled by circumstances, doing the best they could, but walking in the dark, essentially.

“That’s what I’m asking my reader to do — walk that road with us.”