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BBC 'Wolf Hall', when does it start?
Derek Faye
Posts: 1,081 Forum Member
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Based on the Hilary Mantel book and starring Damien Lewis as Henry the eighth, the cast is really good!
Hoping it will be around Christmas time perhaps.
Anyone else looking forward to this mini-series?
Hoping it will be around Christmas time perhaps.
Anyone else looking forward to this mini-series?
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I never had that problem with the book, but I've seen a lot of people complaining about it. Once the narrative perspective was understood, it wasn't difficult. Try thinking of it as a story being related to you by someone who was there, almost like you're sitting round a campfire listening to someone tell the tale.
Meh. Would it really have killed her to insert a character's name now and again to indicate the speaker? Not doing so made the book needlessly difficult to read and impeded the flow of the narrative. There was no artistic reason to do it - it was just a silly affectation.
This. I gave up on the book in the end. I thought it was me, but a colleague had the same problem.
Actually I think there was an artistic reason to do it. I found it an ingenious technique, making me feel closer to Cromwell's character - as if you're actually in his mind - it somehow allowed me to read the text more quickly too. I had no problems with it at all and zoomed through this book plus Bring Up the Bodies. I appreciate that I've got an English literature degree but plenty of people haven't and also had no problems with the technique. Maybe it depends how literal someone's mind is because it's quite a poetic, almost Modernist, technique.
^^ Plus 1 that, lostprophet. I thought it was great. Very difficult - and daring - for a writer to get past the 'he said, she said' thing, but once you got the hang of it, it was brilliant. Yes it was partisan to make the reader see things from inside Cromwell's mind, but all novels have some kind of angle, it's inescapable, and at least this is an open way of dealing with it.
The reason I love Mantel is that she assumes her readers have the agility to follow her - however unfamiliar, weird or dark it gets. She never lets you down if you do.
Unlike, I have to say, the stage versions of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. I was really excited about this, and having seen rave reviews I bought tickets for both shows. My god, what a boring plod through the plot. Stripped of the book's insights, slyness, compassion, humour and horror, the plays present you with the yawningly familiar story of the Tudors. I expected the beautiful writing to be expressed through some kind of theatricality or dramatic tension, but, nope. It could have been a Sunday evening costume drama by Julian Fellowes.
I know Hilary Mantel was very involved in the adaptations. But she isn't a dramatist, and I think the plays show what happens when a production is too respectful of (intimidated by?) the author.
I almost don't want to see the telly version, because if it's as bad as the stage plays it'll taint the books for me. But telly does subtle way better than theatre, so I'll give it a go...