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I did not like Wolf Hall, or at least I did not get all the praise. Aside from the needless pronoun obscurantism, I thought it gave too little. Despite all the time spent in his head, I did not see how Cromwell came to be the person he was. He seemed fully formed at the start; he was an enigma at the beginning, and an enigma at the end. Although we know he was the puppet masterin many ways, the way the external events are described it felt as if he were merely a witness of historical forces. You are told what happened, but left unsure how they came to be. I thought Mantel went too far correcting the popular perception. She made Cromwell too much of an enlightened man, More too much of a fundamentalist monster.
The prose is beautiful, and the way she applies modern style and speech to historical fiction is novel. But I thought the book was unsatisfying as both history and character study. I could've stopped reading anywhere after 100 pages and would have gotten about the same out of it. So I didn't bother with the second volume.
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