Thomas Cromwell Has No Clothes

One of my charming idiosyncrasies is that I often resist reading bestsellers while they are at their peak of popularity.  This often leads to me shouting with jubilation about discovering a great book that everyone else already knows about.  Sometimes the opposite happens.

I’ve just taken up Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s 2009 blockbuster retelling of Thomas Cromwell’s life.  It won—pull up a chair, this will take a while—the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, The Morning News Tournament of Books, the Audie Award for Literary Fiction for the audiobook, and the AudioFile Earphone Award for the audiobook.

And it’s just awful.

The writing, I mean.  (No quarrel here with her famously thorough historical research.)  As Susan Bassnett put it, in a rare negative review in Times Higher Education, it’s "dreadfully badly written….” And it’s dreadfully bad in ways that would have been SO easy to fix, given a good line-editor such as a story this big deserved:

Hilary just can’t handle her pronouns.  At all.

Take a look at this typical paragraph from page 33.

“He had liked old Wykys.  He first came to him on a legal matter.  In those days he was—what, twenty-seven?—not long back from abroad, prone to start a sentence in one language and finish it in another.  Wykys had been shrewd and had made a tidy fortune in the wool trade.  He was a Putney man originally, but that wasn’t why he employed him; it was because he came recommended and came cheap.”

Now I ask you, who came to whom? Who was twenty-seven? Did Wykys employ Thomas or did Thomas employ Wykys? And which was a Putney man? You can reason it out, if you care to, but readers shouldn’t have to work to decode pronouns while they are already putting in a hard day’s labor, reconstructing the writer’s world and characters in their imagination.

Now consider what a good line editor might have done with this gobbledy-gook:

“He had liked old Wykys.  He first came to the old man on a legal matter.  In those days Thomas was—what, twenty-seven?—not long back from abroad, prone to start a sentence in one language and finish it in another.  Wykys had been shrewd and had made a tidy fortune in the wool trade—a Putney man originally, but that wasn’t why he employed Thomas; it was because he came recommended and came cheap.”

When I find writing this bad, I don’t usually shame it in public, because this level of ineptness is usually a sign of inexperience.  Just drop it and move on to something better.  But when something is held up as exemplary—Booker Prize committee, I’m looking at YOU—I think it’s at least worth mentioning that the emperor’s new clothes are pretty see-through.