So many books, so little time. Some potted comments.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. An amazing achievement — present tense throughout, and through the eyes of the Tudor politician, Thomas Cromwell. It creates an utterly believable milieu, though which the great and the good, and some of the great and the bad, strut and plot. And Cromwell is a complex character, who develops his political skills as the book proceeds. I thought of Le Carre ‘s spies on the one hand and the busy Samuel Pepys, a century later than this Cromwell, on the other.
The Fall of the King by Johannes V. Jensen. Set in almost exactly the same period as Wolf Hall, this is the story of the Danish King Christian II, famously unable to make up his mind (Hamlet ?) as told through the tale of one of his bodyguard, Mikkel, whose life brings him intermittently and then more permanently in contact with the king. Overall, this is on of the most pessimistic books I have ever read — human beings are all doomed to fall, whether they be peasants or kings.
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. Compared to the doings of Renaissance kings, the action in this novel is wholly domestic — how a young Irish girl, initially with no independence, at the whim of family and townsfolk, once she is sent to New York, begins to develop a mind of her own (slowly, though) and, after returning to Ireland on a visit, where mother and community try to keep her there, returns to her secret husband in Brooklyn, though it’s touch and go until the last minute. Some readers think she should have stayed in Ireland.
The Russia House by John LeCarre. I haven’t finished this yet, but what he does, he does so well. And here as in a number of his books, a sort of contempt for the CIA and the US way of doing things, their paranoia.
