One of my nicest experiences of the past year has been revisiting favourite books and enjoying a new perspective, now my world has shifted. I first read the late, great Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall in the first flush of its popularity after its release in 2009: I was a literature PhD student on a long, but cheap, coach journey to London to attend a conference, and I literally did not put it down for hours at a time. Of course, I applied my literary analysis skills while also being gripped to my soul by Mantel’s groundbreakingly personal and sympathetic story of one of Henry VIII’s most important, and most doomed, ministers, Thomas Cromwell.
Cromwell was Henry’s go-to man at some of the key points in his reign, helping to orchestrate both his controversial marriage to Anne Boleyn in 1533 and her horrific downfall and execution just three years later. He also spearheaded the English Reformation, and arranged Henry’s fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves in 1540. This last move would also be his downfall, however. The king infamously did not like Anne, blamed Cromwell, and had him executed on 28 July 1540, the same day as Henry’s marriage to his fifth wife, Katherine Howard. Gruesome.
You may or may not also be aware that, as historian Tracy Borman pointed out in a recent Historic Royal Palaces podcast episode about Cromwell, that his actions as a minister had a huge impact on our modern methods of government, specifically in the Civil Service.
Wolf Hall covers Cromwell’s early career in high places, first as the powerful Cardinal Wolsey’s servant and then, after Wolsey’s ignominious fall, the king’s. I have always been struck by the book’s historical texture, its realism (the prose feels like time travel), its rich characterisation, and, probably above all, Mantel’s mastery of free indirect discourse: a fluid narrative technique where third-person narration merges with a character’s internal consciousness. Ingeniously, Mantel rarely names Cromwell in the early pages, referring to him simply as ‘he.’ When I researched and taught English literature, I spent many happy hours discussing how this technique pulls the reader directly inside Cromwell’s mind, creating an intimate, almost claustrophobic proximity to his thoughts.
Picking the novel up again recently, this time as a newly-minted data engineer, I was struck by how differently, and how much more personally, that same narrative technique landed with me. In data engineering, we spend a lot of time thinking about architecture, state management, and how data moves through complex systems. A pipeline is a structural network of inputs, transformations, dependencies, and outputs that by definition must balance different requirements and obligations, and often the stakes are high. Data engineers have to maintain both a bird’s-eye view of the entire workflow and also a granular awareness of every single edge case that might break it, to say nothing of the people and businesses depending on it.
Reading Wolf Hall now, I realise that Mantel’s free indirect discourse could be seen as a kind of literary equivalent of a high-performing processing engine. We see the Tudor court not through an omniscient, detached narrator, but through Cromwell’s hyper-observant, analytical processing unit, because that’s what this exceptional man was, and Mantel knew it. Her Cromwell is, at heart, a master of systems. Long before he becomes the King’s chief minister, he is a man who notices everything: the weight of a bolt of silk, the subtle shift in a ambassador’s posture, the precise lineage of a debt, the exact yield of an estate. Where others see chaos, court intrigue, or divine providence, I do think that Cromwell sees data points. He collects raw information, filters out the noise, maps the underlying dependencies (if I may say!) between powerful families, and builds strategic outcomes with quiet, methodical precision.
Mantel captures this brilliantly through her immersive prose style:
“He can draft a contract, prime a witness, parcel up a plot of land to pay an inheritance tax, make a coat for a client or an inventory of his assets; he can assess a yield of grain or a strain of wool…”
As an academic and simply a reader, I have always admired this as a character study in pragmatism. As a data engineer, I recognise it almost as a description of a brilliant pipeline developer. Cromwell takes unstructured, messy human inputs (rumours, ledgers, political debts, personal grudges) and transforms them into structured, actionable intelligence. (I really hope, and believe, he would appreciated this comparison!)
I find myself identifying with Cromwell in entirely new ways now. When I’m considering a data pipeline or studying a problem in my organisation, I like to think I feel a spark of that same quiet satisfaction Cromwell takes in bringing order to Tudor administrative chaos. It’s the pleasure of the strategist, perhaps, who delights in detail, craft, and functional design.
One of the joys of transitioning from literature to tech has been the discovery that I didn’t leave literature behind. Far from it; tech, in fact, has simply expanded how I understand literary complexity. Wolf Hall remains one of my favourite books, and it is close to my heart for new reasons. Reading it now reminds me that whether we are working with sentences, historical context, code or CLI commands, the fundamental impulse is often the same: to pay close attention to the details, understand how the system fits together, and craft something elegant and resilient out of the complexity. Hopefully, though, the stakes are lower than they were for poor Thomas.
References:
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, 2009)
Historic Royal Palaces, ‘The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell: Henry’s Right Hand Man.’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIeT8_LS0Vs)