The price you pay for leaving home without a book

I always carry a book with me when I know I have to spend time traveling or waiting or even if there’s just a hint of a danger of traveling or waiting. So why did I then like an idiot go to a meeting where I knew I had to pass 45 minutes on my own without a good book to keep me company? Well, that you may very well ask, the answer is a mystery even to myself.

But there I was, on my way to the meeting, clearly bookless. Imagine my happiness when I stopped for a bit of lunch and realised there was a library right next to the café I was in! With 10 extra minutes to spare I rushed in and pretty much grabbed the first book I could even vaguely imagine reading. And what did I get? Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies – a book I vowed never to read.

A while back I read Wolf Hall, Mantel’s first acclaimed novel in what was going to be a trilogy. Only I found out about the trilogy bit after finishing the first part and wondering why Anne Boleyn was still alive…

I was initially very excited about the book - I mean who wouldn’t be? A book about Thomas Cromwell, a forefather (great uncle or some such) of the great Oliver; Henry VIII’s main man, the man behind a mountain of beheadings… I’ve always loved biographies and histories, despite or perhaps because of suffering from the worst history teacher in the history of teaching. I’ve read about Henry VIII, his wives, his daughter Elisabeth; about Charles II, George IV (or v?), his children – just to mention a few in British history (then there are the kings & queens of other European countries, but that’s another story). So in a word: excited!

I should have taken more notice when a friend of mine said she didn’t finish Woolf Hall. She’s someone I love talking books with, someone with a similar but not always the same taste in books. We’re read tons of the same books and agreed on most of them but not by far all. I probably like history a little more than she does so I figured that maybe this just wasn’t her cup of tea. And ignoring all signs of warning on I plunged – straight into the depths of Tudor intrigues. I mean come on – she won the bloody Booker prize, didn’t she?

Why she won the Booker is the more relevant question. I found Wolf Hall tedious – it was too long, too dull, and too full of boring details. And as I’m fond of historical facts I found all the fictional dialogue between real historical characters dubious and annoying. Also the character of Thomas Cromwell was just too much. Surely such a great humanist, a smartass, a man who has survived from an abusive childhood and a few wars and has risen to great power, a man who seems to instinctively know what other people are thinking - surely such a man knows better than to get himself beheaded? OK, yes, I’m running ahead of things, so far Cromwell is on the height of his power and is so far beheading other people, but it’s just difficult to see how he’s going to transform into a very different person. That is if Mantel is even remotely true to history. Maybe this time he lives to see his grandchildren grow old.

But more to the point: will I ever finish Bring Up the Bodies, which I reluctantly started to read to pass the time but never got further than page 7? I run into a colleague by accident and so spent my waiting time merrily chatting away instead of ruining my day with Mantel.

So what is the price you pay for leaving home without a book? You get stuck with Hilary Mantel.

Ps. The first 7 pages were just like the first 500 of Wolf hall…