Wolf Hall + Running + Downton Abbey 2x03
Oct. 3rd, 2011 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ariadnes_stringLong post is long—sorry!
So, I listened to all 24 hours of Wolf Hall and I loved every minute of it. Mostly I listened in the car (I drive a lot—mostly 10-15 minute trips from pillar to post) but some while I was running.
(and so, strangely, the novel was good for my fitness level, between my new Vibram five fingers, which look like this:
And kind of make me resemble this:
But make running less painful for me than it ever has been before (though, sadly, no faster)—anyway, between the shoes and the narrative, I actually wanted to run!)
It’s a kind of strange experience to listen to narrative as you run, though. The novel has some very sad parts, and I happened to listen to those as I was running during the last heat of the summer. So there I was slogging along in my blue shoes, pouring sweat and crying. I’ve been listening to Regeneration for the past few days, and I’m sure my face is fixed in a permanent sympathetic grimace.
I’m an aural person at the best of times, and I think in some ways it’s easier for me to process and remember books I hear than books I read. Also, of course, listening is slower. So I found that I had a greater awareness of the novel’s technical achievements than I think I would have done if I’d read (all 600 pp. of) it.
Which of course my book group had not interest in talking about , so I’m just going to go on about it for a minute now, feel free to scroll by.
I was just blown away by Mantel’s ability to write a novel that long from such a tight third-person POV. A novel that long that establishes not only historical but global sweep. There may be some overview that aren’t in Cromwell’s POV (though I heard them as free indirect discourse) but everything else that happens he either witnesses, or hears about from someone else, or imagines.
It helps in this that both the historical Cromwell and Mantel’s seem to have an extraordinary ability to interpret and process information—steel-trap minds. And Mantel also endows hers with great imaginative powers. So the clarity of events isn’t compromised by seeing it all through his eyes. In fact, everything is so clear that it’s genuinely shocking to have an episode of disordered thinking/delirium late in the book—deprived of Cromwell’s clarity, you feel as adrift as he is.
Moreover, she makes the most of his having been brought up in the wool trade and among merchants. There’s a description (and usually a pricing out) of what everyone’s wearing in just about every scene—which is both a great character tic and a great way to give the reader lots and lots of visual detail.
There’s a great moment, for instance, when Cromwell is thinking about the information that Thomas More regularly scourges himself. Cromwell dismisses the practice, but then wonders how many people are kept in work by making scourges out of twigs, etc. And thinks maybe it’s worthwhile on the employment front.
Apparently, Mantel is writing a sequel that takes Cromwell to his historical end, but I’m not sure I can bear to read it—he’s so powerfully alive in this one.
Mantel also has a great facility with symbol—she’s able to pick up bits of historical trivia and turn them into both personal drama and a kind of meta-commentary on the process of making and recording history. There’s a wonderful leit motif in the book about memory practices/ memory machines, for instance.
I love historical novels (if you haven’t noticed!) and this one made me think about the ways in which historical fiction is like fan fiction: in both, you’re given a set of parameters, and have to think about fleshing out, or filling in, or thinking of plausible emotional explanations for those parameters.
So then I wrote a little Downton Abbey snippet last week about WWI war wounds. And that made me want to re-read Pat Barker’s Regeneration. But, things being as they are, that means re-listening. Anyway, the novel completely holds up (it came out in 1991), though I expect it wouldn’t be everyone’s first choice for what to listen to in the car. It may, however, have spoiled my enjoyment of Downton Abbey. Because really, talk about two different perspectives about what was going on in the north of England in 1916! In Regeneration, women in service are telling off their employers right and left and going to work in the munitions factories—just for example.
The tumblr!fans seem to have enjoyed last night’s episode, and I enjoyed the Anna/Bates stuff and the Mary/Matthew/Lavinia stuff myself (oh, and Edith!). But I found myself getting excessively irritated by Lord and Lady Grantham’s pissy-ness about turning Downton into a convalescent home. I mean, I get that they are aristocrats and used to having lots of space, but was I really supposed to sympathize with their discomfort when men who had managed to survive the trenches needed a place to recover? I think the episode wanted me to be a little annoyed at them—but I was hugely annoyed.
Also, I hated the way they dealt with the Lang storyline. Last week I thought they were setting up an interesting relationship between him and O’Brien (omg, the way she was the only one who would touch him after his nightmare?! that might have to be its own fic). But now they appear to have sent him packing (in much the same way Courtenay was sent off to the underworld). They seem happy to have little bits of war reality to intrude basically in the service of other plot lines. I expect Lang being let go was realistic, but I wanted a little more acknowledgement of how hard it would be for a shell-shocked veteran to survive, much less “recover” once he’d been turned out of his job. Also, wanted to buy Lang a ticket to Craiglockhart.
Maybe he’ll come back?
Ugh. Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. Hopefully I’ll go back to enjoying the series—I want to!
So, I listened to all 24 hours of Wolf Hall and I loved every minute of it. Mostly I listened in the car (I drive a lot—mostly 10-15 minute trips from pillar to post) but some while I was running.
(and so, strangely, the novel was good for my fitness level, between my new Vibram five fingers, which look like this:
And kind of make me resemble this:
But make running less painful for me than it ever has been before (though, sadly, no faster)—anyway, between the shoes and the narrative, I actually wanted to run!)
It’s a kind of strange experience to listen to narrative as you run, though. The novel has some very sad parts, and I happened to listen to those as I was running during the last heat of the summer. So there I was slogging along in my blue shoes, pouring sweat and crying. I’ve been listening to Regeneration for the past few days, and I’m sure my face is fixed in a permanent sympathetic grimace.
I’m an aural person at the best of times, and I think in some ways it’s easier for me to process and remember books I hear than books I read. Also, of course, listening is slower. So I found that I had a greater awareness of the novel’s technical achievements than I think I would have done if I’d read (all 600 pp. of) it.
Which of course my book group had not interest in talking about , so I’m just going to go on about it for a minute now, feel free to scroll by.
I was just blown away by Mantel’s ability to write a novel that long from such a tight third-person POV. A novel that long that establishes not only historical but global sweep. There may be some overview that aren’t in Cromwell’s POV (though I heard them as free indirect discourse) but everything else that happens he either witnesses, or hears about from someone else, or imagines.
It helps in this that both the historical Cromwell and Mantel’s seem to have an extraordinary ability to interpret and process information—steel-trap minds. And Mantel also endows hers with great imaginative powers. So the clarity of events isn’t compromised by seeing it all through his eyes. In fact, everything is so clear that it’s genuinely shocking to have an episode of disordered thinking/delirium late in the book—deprived of Cromwell’s clarity, you feel as adrift as he is.
Moreover, she makes the most of his having been brought up in the wool trade and among merchants. There’s a description (and usually a pricing out) of what everyone’s wearing in just about every scene—which is both a great character tic and a great way to give the reader lots and lots of visual detail.
There’s a great moment, for instance, when Cromwell is thinking about the information that Thomas More regularly scourges himself. Cromwell dismisses the practice, but then wonders how many people are kept in work by making scourges out of twigs, etc. And thinks maybe it’s worthwhile on the employment front.
Apparently, Mantel is writing a sequel that takes Cromwell to his historical end, but I’m not sure I can bear to read it—he’s so powerfully alive in this one.
Mantel also has a great facility with symbol—she’s able to pick up bits of historical trivia and turn them into both personal drama and a kind of meta-commentary on the process of making and recording history. There’s a wonderful leit motif in the book about memory practices/ memory machines, for instance.
I love historical novels (if you haven’t noticed!) and this one made me think about the ways in which historical fiction is like fan fiction: in both, you’re given a set of parameters, and have to think about fleshing out, or filling in, or thinking of plausible emotional explanations for those parameters.
So then I wrote a little Downton Abbey snippet last week about WWI war wounds. And that made me want to re-read Pat Barker’s Regeneration. But, things being as they are, that means re-listening. Anyway, the novel completely holds up (it came out in 1991), though I expect it wouldn’t be everyone’s first choice for what to listen to in the car. It may, however, have spoiled my enjoyment of Downton Abbey. Because really, talk about two different perspectives about what was going on in the north of England in 1916! In Regeneration, women in service are telling off their employers right and left and going to work in the munitions factories—just for example.
The tumblr!fans seem to have enjoyed last night’s episode, and I enjoyed the Anna/Bates stuff and the Mary/Matthew/Lavinia stuff myself (oh, and Edith!). But I found myself getting excessively irritated by Lord and Lady Grantham’s pissy-ness about turning Downton into a convalescent home. I mean, I get that they are aristocrats and used to having lots of space, but was I really supposed to sympathize with their discomfort when men who had managed to survive the trenches needed a place to recover? I think the episode wanted me to be a little annoyed at them—but I was hugely annoyed.
Also, I hated the way they dealt with the Lang storyline. Last week I thought they were setting up an interesting relationship between him and O’Brien (omg, the way she was the only one who would touch him after his nightmare?! that might have to be its own fic). But now they appear to have sent him packing (in much the same way Courtenay was sent off to the underworld). They seem happy to have little bits of war reality to intrude basically in the service of other plot lines. I expect Lang being let go was realistic, but I wanted a little more acknowledgement of how hard it would be for a shell-shocked veteran to survive, much less “recover” once he’d been turned out of his job. Also, wanted to buy Lang a ticket to Craiglockhart.
Maybe he’ll come back?
Ugh. Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. Hopefully I’ll go back to enjoying the series—I want to!
