Well, I got through two thirds of it, by virtue of
listening to the audiobook while I do other, more worthwhile, things. Like
ironing. Eventually, I lost the will to live and stopped listening. I’ve
been putting off writing anything about this in case I get a sudden urge to
pick it up again and carry on, but it’s not going to happen.
There’s a lot to enjoy in this book. There are
wonderful characters, caught at a crucial moment in history. The author has
captured to perfection the sights and sounds and smells of the Tudor era. There’s
humour, too, from time to time. But there’s just so much of it, every scene
dragged out to many times the necessary length, endless discussion around meal
tables with only a few meaningful lines. If it could have been distilled to
normal book size, it would have been a very readable book. As it is, I found it
plain tedious, especially after Wolsey’s demise.
For historians, it must be a thrill to see these
important characters brought to vibrant life. For literary types, there is
pleasure in the elegant language and apt turns of phrase. For me, as a reader
looking for a story, it was a failure. There was no tension in the retelling of
events to which every child knows the ending. The one character who needed to
spring to life, Thomas Cromwell himself, was flatter than paper. He was
described in the blurb as ambitious, and other characters mention him as a
climber, yet we see no examples of it. On the contrary, he remains loyal to
Wolsey to the end, and appears to luck into his role with the king. He’s
hard working and intelligent, rather than conniving. We see something of his
family life, but rarely see any signs of affection. And in the end, I didn’t
care about him, either, or any of them, with the possible exception of Wolsey.
One star for a DNF.
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