Lions in Tower, Wolves in the Hall

From time to time, experience dishes up a small, delicious irony.  I’m currently experiencing one.  Every few days I’m startled awake in the middle of the night.  I lay perfectly still, listening.  I’ve always wondered if it’s possible that destiny exists, but only in subtle things.  As I think about it, that’s not inconsistent with Quantum Mechanics.  But I digress.

Is it illness?  Fears about money, a friend, a lover, mortality?  We all have those sometime or other.

Fortunately not.  Here are the first two lines of my historical novel As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields:  “There were lions in the tower that summer and fall.  Their hollow roars woke me every morning before the sun came through the lancet window into my room.”  I hadn’t had that experience when I wrote and rewrote and rewrote again those sentences.

I have now. 

We have the curious fortune to live just above a zoo and recently they acquired two new adolescent lions.  Every few days I’m wakened suddenly by their “hollow” roars; the adjective, by the way, is exactly right.  What to make of it?  It’s obvious.  The thing to do is enjoy it.  It’s a startling pleasure to be wakened by lions.

A different kind of startling pleasure is the BBC mini-series of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall which we’ve been watching.   There is so much to praise about it.  The acting is phenomenal:  each performance is revelatory, from Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell, to Anton Lesser’ Thomas Moore to Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn to pick just three.  The drama Rylance creates by what he hides and what he shows of Cromwell’s character is totally absorbing.  Claire Foy’s Anne  is seminal, which is amazing when you consider the great actresses who’ve played the role in so many contexts.  She discovers an imperious vulnerability coupled with a ferocious ambition that is convincing not just in the context of the drama but the history itself.  Lesser’s Sir Thomas Moore is an effete, cruel, intellectually vain narcissist.  Nevertheless, Lesser’s performance and a very finely wrought script lead me through an arc to a point of  compassion, sorrow and understanding at his death.  (And I’m not an easy sell, by the way:  I’m familiar with Moore not only through Utopia and Robert Bolt’s famous play but the biography of his son-in-law William Roper as well.)  Indeed, that’s one of the great beauties of the series.  You feel you know these people as you know people in real life.

Perhaps, the most surprising subtle beauty of the production is the way it captures the spatial and temporal texture of Tudor life.  It conveys a unique sense of the passage of time, of lives lived in closer proximity to the natural world than ours, at the same time it develops political drama that is as frightening and compelling as any I’ve ever seen.  I’ve read that one of the appeals of HBO’s series “Game of Thrones” is the danger:  anything can happen to anyone at any time.  No one is safe in “Wolf Hall,” either, but, for me, it’s more frightening and compelling.  It’s dangers often arise from the common place, what’s partly known or guessed at which is so much a part of the human social condition.

On the spur of the moment, Lynn and I ran down to the zoo early this morning to take a couple of photos of the culprits and one of them is above.  Later, over huevos rancheros at the Oasis Café we were discussing “Wolf Hall” and she offered a provocative thesis:  if Henry hadn’t married Anne we (meaning we North Americans) would be speaking Spanish.  Her reasoning being that if it hadn’t been for the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries and abbeys that came as a consequence of the Boleyn marriage, England might not have had the capital to develop into the maritime power that was essential for colonization.