I wanted to save a couple of quotes from Wolf Hall before I return the book.

“How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the and the powder and the shot.”

“And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marches of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and the bogarts who live in the hedges and in the hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug into unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of the uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priests and friar who feed on living England, and such the substance from the future.”

Booker.

by Hilary Mantel

Getting my hands on the sequels as soon as possible.

I had no idea how much I would love this book. I didn’t think I cared about Henry VIII and the Tudors and the machinations of powerful now-dead people. But watching the Protestant Reformation unfold in England turns out to be an incredibly exciting excuse for simultaneously enjoying some absolutely beautiful prose. Two bookmarks:

“How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.”

“For they too are his countrymen: the generations of the uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priests and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance of the future.”

I didn’t care that I didn’t know precisely what was going on sometimes. As I’ve said before, I don’t refer back or forward to “casts of characters” or some such. A novelist has to make sense to me as the story flows; I’m not doing a book report here. And this all made sense; even when I didn’t grasp every detail as it flew by, I was always quickly regrounded.