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Book Wolf isn't the easiest thing you'll ever read, but it's not that hard to get into—it isn't James Joyce but it isn't Clive Cussler, either. Mantel's writing style is accessible, but the plot itself is intricate—I know that roving bands of raging academics would hang me in my habit for saying it like this, but as far as the number of characters and the network of conflicts go, Wolf Hall is Game of Thrones-level complex. Characters' moves and motivations tend toward the opaque—the windows into the human heart require a bit of prying.By placing Cromwell's dirty work within reasonably imagined historical and personal contexts, a more sympathetic human being starts to emerge.
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As for the second tragedy, in history—and in Mantel's book—Cromwell's wife, Elizabeth, died in 1527, victim to a swift and deadly disease that raged through London that summer called the sweating sickness. Exactly when his daughters, Anne and Grace, died is less clear, but Mantel places their deaths side by side in the summer of 1529 from the same disease, a not unlikely scenario. But for some reason TV Wolf has them all die at the same time—on the exact same day. Just as Cromwell comes home from his hard day's work and learns of his wife's awful fate, as he tearfully encounters her corpse laid out in their bed, his young assistant Rafe runs in and says with quiet melodramatic urgency, "It's the girls."Everyone runs to their room, only to find the little blond visions of youthful purity and innocence side by side in their bed, pale, motionless—dead.Good god, Britain. What is with your television shows and their unwavering devotion to the melo-iest of melodrama? How many Matthew Crawleys need to die in "unexpected" car accidents an instant after meeting their precious newborn sons before you realize that you're sort of overdoing it? Is Cromwell losing his wife and two-thirds of his progeny not sticking enough for tragedy? I recognize that I'm being equally melodramatic about a small plot point. But do you really believe that, whether they died together or a few years apart, the loneliness and abandonment that Cromwell would have felt from it was any less bearable?The way details slide around and change from book to movie or book to TV always leaves me in some kind of Sliding Doors scenario where I just don't know what universe I live in anymore. Did Liv Tyler fall in love with Aragorn in the The Lord of the Rings book? Did Tom Bombadil sing his stupid song in the movie? Can elves really do parcour on elephant trunks? I can't remember in Game of Thrones whether Jon Snow is 14 or in his 20s, whether Jorah Mormont is a fat slob or a muscular swashbuckler, or whether Renly Baratheon was outright fucking that guy or people just kind of thought he was gay. If Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time in Slaughterhouse Five, I think I'm unstuck in story.Which is leading me to conclude that maybe I should just choose between reading the book or watching the screen adaptation—of any story. Doing both is making for too much dissociation. Not like drank-two-bottles-of-Robitussin-D kind of detachment. But I can't say that the nether region between the worlds is leaving me with any sense of a firm footing.On the other hand, if I'm the kind of person who is finding his emotions ignited by assessing the quality of Masterpiece adaptations of British novels, I think this kind of cognitive slippage is about as close as I'll ever get to Robo-chugging. So off we go to episode four.Follow Aidan on Twitter.TV Wolf gets loose with a few plot points and historical details for reasons that seem to be less about TV storytelling and more about the show's creators trying to find some narrative territory to mark as their own.