Wolf Hall: A New Approach to Historical Fiction

The conundrum that all historical fiction authors face is how to make a story exciting when the readers know what happens to the major characteristics historically. At first glance, Hilary Mantel's 530 page novel set in the court of Henry VIII as the king attempts to make an heir, faces an especially daunting task of creating something original. Readers interested in this story know about Henry VIII's successful quest to become head of the Church of England, annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn. We also know that Thomas More is killed for being a heretic. Most importantly, we know that Thomas Cromwell somehow made all this happen as the King's right-hand man.

But Mantel draws on what we don't know to capture our attention. Namely, we don't know how the politics of the time allowed the son of a blacksmith to rise to become a king's secretary. Mantel sheds light on this subject by using a wholly original voice. She tells everything from Cromwell's perspective, but through selective third-person narration rather than first. While this strategy takes several pages to get used to, it contributes to a unique experience unlike any that I've encountered before in historical fiction. Instead of telling us what Cromwell feels in third person, instead of Cromwell narrating "I thought" such and such, Mantel uses Cromwell like a camera lens, exposing us only to what he can see at the moment. For example, early in the book, when the young Cromwell finds a refuge on a ship after escaping his abusive father, we get this line:

"He is surprised. Are there people in the world who are not cruel to their children? For the first time, the weight in his chest shifts a little; he thinks, there could be other places, better."

And so, the story seems to be narrated with one delightful observation to another. On writing bills for Henry VIII: "His bills are passed but there is always another bill. When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power." On asking a woman if she still has sex with her husband: "That's a conversation I shouldn't have had." On the sentencing of Thomas More and other heretics: "The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms...This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase."

Luckily for us, Cromwell is a pretty astute camera lens. He always happens to be in the midst of the politicking and deal making, bringing us behind the scenes of Sixteenth Century kingdom management. If Mantel means to make any sweeping pronouncements, it's that humanity remains excruciatingly unchanged despite four hundred years of progress. On the one hand, man is ruled by reason and science over faith; petulant kings no longer order stake-burnings at their whim. On the other hand, people still scheme, still seek justifications from some higher being for all their actions. Above all, the powerful still need Cromwells to do their dirty work, while we continue to wonder which is more guilty.

Best of the Best of the Decade Lists

Now that I'm done with LSAT's, I'm trying to revel in non-law school bliss before I need to actually start applying.

In the meantime, the end of the year is always a robust list-making season. Lists of presents to ask for, lists of people to buy for, and lists of resolutions to aim for. Most fun are lists of the year's best media products. What makes this year ten times better is that it also marks the end of the Gregorian decade. I'm tempted to make a personal list of this decade's best, but considering I spent the bulk of the decade being an emo teenager, I am probably not a good source. Instead, I've taken the opportunity to discover all the things I missed while in my emo trance most of this past decade by looking at some publications' best of the decade lists. The top three (one each for books, films, and music) best best of the decade lists are as follows:

Books
The Times Online 100 Best Books of the Decade is a pretty uncontroversial list that's large enough to leave no one slighted. Personal favorites like Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud both made it. The list spans both non-fiction and fiction and recognizes influence over quality. The DaVinci Code, for instance, appears at number 10 with this explanation "A murder in the Louvre, and the clues are all hidden in the works of Leonardo. Some love it, some hate it (see our worst of the decade article), but you can’t deny that its mix of conspiracy, riddles and action dominated the decade." The most refreshing aspect of this list is its attention to British writers. Two items that got much less press on this side of the Atlantic that this list includes are Lorna Sage's Bad Blood and a collection of poetry, Rapture, by Carol Ann Duffy.

Films
My boyfriend introduced me to The Onion's AV Club several months ago, but it really established credibility in my mind with its month long "Best of the Decade" feature. The AV Club gives kudos in unconventional categories such as best comics, best comedy albums, and best tv episodes. The most helpful list by far is the Best films of the '00s. The list's trustworthiness is revealed in its strong picks included in the top 5: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, There will be Blood, No Country for Old Men, and Memento. The top 5 also includes something I hadn't seen: 25th Hour, which I now trust to add to my Netflix queue. The other 45 picks include many Asian films that I wasn't aware of. Also, don't take my word for it: David Plotz gives the list a shoutout on Slate's Political Gabfest.

Music
Music lists are of a different character than books or films. Music is more of a continuous experience; once you put something on your iPod or download it, it becomes part of your collection. Whereas you can always borrow a book or rent a movie and quickly return it. Music, on the other hand, reflects one's personal tastes more. That's why I find best music lists to be so gratuitous. They can only advise others who have the same taste as you or say what the influential things have been. NPR has taken the latter path with a wholly unsurprising list on All Things Considered. (Kelly Clarkson, Kanye, J-Z inevitably make that list). But I prefer lists that cater to my taste. Paste Magazine has a terrific one that seems targeted towards the aging hipster (40-65) demographic (i.e. perfect for me). It's very strong on mellow productions like Damien Rice's O, the Once Soundtrack, and Jens Lekman. It's also heavy on alt-country and introduced me to Drive By Truckers and inspired me to re-discover Ryan Adams. The story-telling focus on both these acts would have once bored a younger me, but make an older me really happy.

Little Magic in the Magicians

The dust jacket of Lev Grossman's latest novel, The Magicians, claims that it's an homage to The Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter novels. Having not read a fantasy novel in a long time and having heard that this was supposed to be a fantasy novel for adults, I decided to give it a try. It wasn't like there were other books in the series that I'd then feel obligated to read, I figured.

It turns out that there's a reason fantasy novels are generally presented in a series.

Fantasy novels, as Michael Agger points out in a recent review of The Magicians, "are a bit like magic themselves." He writes, "To work, they require of readers a willingness to be fooled, to be gulled into a world of walking trees and talking lions." It requires many words to set up a believable situation where lions talk and trees walk. Harry Potter's adventures come with an entire history of Voldemort and an epic battle between good and evil. We feel like Harry's story is only a moment -- though a pivotal one -- in his world.

Grossman forgoes the set-up in his book. As a result, instead of creating a rich, albeit unbelievable world a la JK Rowling, Grossman compiles a series of disconnected fantastical elements to advance the plot along as his convenience. The book opens with the main character, Quentin, magically following a crumpled piece of paper to Brakebills, a magic school supposedly situated on the Hudson in New York state. He endures an examination, after which the Dean of the school explains that he's been admitted to magic school. This is easy to follow, but difficult to understand. Why is there a magic school? How long has magic been around? How many "magicians" are there? In targeting an adult audience, perhaps Grossman figured we'd have less tolerance of explication. But it's exactly because we're adults that it's more difficult for us to suspend disbelief.

Or perhaps Grossman was too busy making the novel's theme very obvious. In a nutshell, the novel is about the trials and tribulations of growing up. College, the real world, the fantastical magic world, is not really what it's cut out to be. There is no magical solution to life's problems. As if this weren't clear enough from Quentin's constant complaints that Brakebills did not fulfill his hopes of what he had expected it to be, one of the Deans gives a handy graduation speech to the students at the end of their time at Brakebills:

"I think you're magicians because you're unhappy...He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it...Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was?"

This would be a fine lesson if it were geared towards teenagers. However, Lev Grossman's target audience will likely find it trite.

The one compelling component of the novel was guessing the extent to which Grossman is satirizing elite colleges and universities. As both a Harvard and Yale grad, Grossman was probably a nerdy kid who found himself admitted to a strange, elitist world when he entered college. Some of the challenges facing his students sound a lot like the problems one might imagine a teenager "burdened" with brilliance, or wealth might have. For example, when the Quentin graduates, he bemoans his post-graduation choices.

"It was considered chic to go undercover, to infiltrate governments and think tanks and NGOs...And on and on, and it all sounded completely, horribly plausible. any one of a thousand options promised -- basically guaranteed -- a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out?"

Poor Quentin. Magic can't solve all his problems. Unfortunately, this is a lesson most adults don't need a fantasy novel to confirm.

The Anthologist - Nicholson Baker

My negligence of this new blog only proves that I was undeserving of cindyhong.com. In the past few weeks I’ve been called away from the blog by my moving into a new apartment and by some LSAT shenanigans. Despite the lsat’s – (and a two day addiction to Top Law School forums) - I was able to read Nicholson Baker’s new book, The Anthologist.

This book is a work of fiction. But beyond that, it’s very hard to classify. Told from the perspective of a poet, Paul Chowder, The Anthologist contains background rather than a conventional plot. Paul is a known, but not star, poet who is anthologizing a book of poems, Only Rhymes. His failure to write his overdue introduction causes his long-time girlfriend, Roz, to leave him. Paul has no recourse but to write in his journal.

Readers are quickly treated to Paul’s stream-of-conscious thoughts, jumping from one topic to a tangentially related one. He writes like your ADD friend, only with more knowledge of poetry. In an especially introspective moment, he thinks, “God, I wish I was a canoe. Either that or some kind of tree tumor that could be made into a zebra bowl but isn’t because I’m still on the tree.”

As for the poetry, that is the real purpose of this book. It’s literary criticism for the layman, disguised as a novel. Paul seems to work out his thoughts just as an eccentric humanist might in real life. On the one hand, you get the feeling that Baker wanted to write a serious book on poetry, and—having trouble uniting his thoughts together in a coherent way—decided to transmit the disjointed bits through the voice of Paul Chowder. On the other hand, Paul’s voice is so earnest, so singular, that you feel like his ideas are truly original and worthy of your attention. Better yet, once you understand his points, you feel smarter too.

Paul’s key insights are that rhyme is good and that iambic pentameter is overrated. Instead, English poetry naturally consists of a four-beat rhythm where the last one is a rest. Paul entertainlingly opines:

“So the first thing about the history of rhyme . . . is that it’s all happened before. It’s all part of these huge rhymeorhythmic circles of exuberance and innovation and surfeit and decay and resurrectional primitivism and waxing sophistication and infill and overgrowth and too much and we can’t stand it and let’s stop and do something else.”

A mouthful, yes. But a provocative and illuminating one.

The Day That Lehman Died

This past week marked not only a September 11 anniversary, but also the one-year anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ collapse and the beginning of the subsequent fall out on Wall Street and across the US. It seemed like every news organization ran some kind of feature, including one by the New York Times “Where-are-they-now” feature that tried to humanize Lehman employees.

In a different spirit, the BBC created a dark radio play, “The Day That Lehman Died.” You can listen to the whole thing here. The idea of radio plays usually conjures up Orson Welles and aliens for me. In the way that his dramatic reading of a fictional account convinced people that the earth was being invaded by Martians, the BBC play convinces listeners that the financial world is basically a vast conspiracy.

The one-hour play takes place over the September weekend last year that decided Lehman’s fate. It is supposed to take us inside the rooms where the decisions not to bail out Lehman and the decision for Bank of America to buy Merrill Lynch occurred. The leaders of major US banks are each played by a deep-voiced actor or another. The show is most successful in its role of mapping out what happened over that weekend to non-finance people like me who got tired of following the news last fall. For example, the show explained that the British government ultimately prevented Barclays from purchasing Lehman.

The show is less effective as drama since it doesn’t identify any good guys or bad guys, so there’s no one to sympathize with. Everyone is portrayed as a greedy, power-hungry, or conniving banker. But this also makes for some great comments that reflect the Wall Street culture: One nameless banker to another on Lehman: “Your CEO is a risk machine.” Bart McDade addressing a roomful of bankers: “Confidence…The entire banking system…the free market…the whole thing works because of confidence…The death of Lehman will destroy that confidence. There will be turmoil.”

Definitely good company on the way to work!