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Dec. 16th, 2014 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotI don't understand why Wolf Hall is called Wolf Hall. Before I read the book I assumed it was the name of Cromwell's house because it's pretty apt, but it's not and they don't even go there and I don't understand if it's meant to be symbolic of anything.
The writing was very good - it might not age well, I don't know, but I thought it was just contemporary enough to sound natural without annoying me as anachronistic - and the pacing was much better than The Tudors. Knowing perfectly well what was going to happen didn't get in the way at all.
But there's a thing that's been getting to me in Tudor fiction and it's the way the Catholic/Protestant divide is handled. Maybe at some point in Bring Up The Bodies there will be more nuance (there isn't much at the point I'm in in that book), but the idea that Protestantism is inherently better seems to come from a combination of 1) the prevalence of Protestantism today and 2) the idea that society gets better when you go forward through history.
Because there are definite issues I have that never seem to come up in this fiction, it's just traditional/conservative/unimaginative people supporting Catholicism and free-thinking/sensible/clever people trying to bring in Protestantism. Like, faith vs. works - "you just have to believe" can be shown as a good philosophy, sure. But, personally, as an agnostic/atheist, I prefer the idea that doing good things > just believing. Or sola scriptura, when I feel that the Bible is flawed and it's perfectly plausible to me that later additions to dogma could improve on it. In a way, Henry VIII's completely self-serving interpretation of Protestantism is more sympathetic (or at least understandable) to me than Cromwell's as presented here. And nobody seems to work very hard to try to make these things sympathetic in fiction, they're treated as inherently noble things in their own right.
Aaaaaaaand I'm on a "non-drowsy" decongestant right now so none of this may make sense. "Decongestant" doesn't look like a word, like shouldn't we pronounce the G as hard? Oh dear
The writing was very good - it might not age well, I don't know, but I thought it was just contemporary enough to sound natural without annoying me as anachronistic - and the pacing was much better than The Tudors. Knowing perfectly well what was going to happen didn't get in the way at all.
But there's a thing that's been getting to me in Tudor fiction and it's the way the Catholic/Protestant divide is handled. Maybe at some point in Bring Up The Bodies there will be more nuance (there isn't much at the point I'm in in that book), but the idea that Protestantism is inherently better seems to come from a combination of 1) the prevalence of Protestantism today and 2) the idea that society gets better when you go forward through history.
Because there are definite issues I have that never seem to come up in this fiction, it's just traditional/conservative/unimaginative people supporting Catholicism and free-thinking/sensible/clever people trying to bring in Protestantism. Like, faith vs. works - "you just have to believe" can be shown as a good philosophy, sure. But, personally, as an agnostic/atheist, I prefer the idea that doing good things > just believing. Or sola scriptura, when I feel that the Bible is flawed and it's perfectly plausible to me that later additions to dogma could improve on it. In a way, Henry VIII's completely self-serving interpretation of Protestantism is more sympathetic (or at least understandable) to me than Cromwell's as presented here. And nobody seems to work very hard to try to make these things sympathetic in fiction, they're treated as inherently noble things in their own right.
Aaaaaaaand I'm on a "non-drowsy" decongestant right now so none of this may make sense. "Decongestant" doesn't look like a word, like shouldn't we pronounce the G as hard? Oh dear
