First of all, let's get this out of the way. One is entitled to write one's book in third person, first person, stream of consciousness, etc. However having the entirety of it in all of those at once, while it produces some lovely meter and paragraph pacing, does run this risk of being a bit confusing.

I feel like I was set up to like this book by personal circumstances. When I was in high school I read Tudor fiction to excess. Then I quit in college because there was nothing new under the sun (just a year before Wolf Hall came out).

My previous experience with Tudor fiction made it easy for me to understand what was going on, whether or not the book did a good job of telling me. That proved necessary because Wolf Hall needs to be read fast. It shouldn't be skimmed, mind, but it needs a certain genial willingness not to worry too much about which person said which thing again. Any time I had to slow down to sort out whose line it was anyway, the book came to an almost complete stop.

This isn't so much about getting in to Cromwell's head, you see, as about Cromwell getting into yours. Once he was there, the book opened up. With very strong characterization and a unique voice, Cromwell is just the sort of person I wanted hovering over my metaphorical shoulder, providing witty commentary. So much of the book was quotable, and a lot of it was laugh-out-loud funny, at least when I had the context straight.

Overall, Hilary Mantel has accomplished something I dearly wanted in my high school days and given Henry VIII's advisers actual personalities, rather than just factions and ideologies.