All fiction is historical and all history is fictive

Though "Wolf Hall" has won the Booker and the NBCC Award it got to awards from our book group; John, who recommended the book, retains his enthusiasm and actually read through it a 2nd time and enjoyed it just as fervently, but he was flying solo this time. At least three of us (including me) reported literally plodding our way through scene after scene, dutifully completing the chore of reading the novel. Not sure that anyone of the other 6 even finished Wolf Hall. We did discuss for quite some time what the book tells us about Henry VIII and rise of Britain as a world power, politically and culturally, about Cromwell's personality, about the class relations, about the strange obsessions with the particulars of religious belief, about the differences in portrayal of Cromwell and More in Wolf Hall and A Man for All Seasons, and about why Wolf Hall is unaccessible to American readers. I was particularly interested in Joan's difficulty with reading historical fiction; I agree, in that we don't know quite what the boundaries are: we tend to read it as historical biography, to "learn" about (in this case) Cromwell, but we are uncertain how many liberties the writer takes (Hilary Mantel offers no guidance on this). But can we accept it, enjoy it, as fiction only? In this case, I would say no - if these were made-up characters in a fantasy kingdom, no one would read this novel. I talked about the difficult of categorizing, and that you have to see all narrative writing as part of a single spectrum, with historical documents on one extreme and personal narrative/memoir on the other, with gradations in between: in a sense, all novels are historical to some degree (they're set somewhere and tell something about a culture, time, and place) and all histories are "fiction" in that the take disparate incidents and pull them together into some kind of narrative shape.