April 23 (Bloomberg) -- Thomas Cromwell is usually remembered as the other Cromwell, shunted to the margins of history by the bloodier exploits of his great-great-great-nephew Oliver, the Puritan warrior.

In her dazzling new novel, “Wolf Hall,” Hilary Mantel brings Thomas barreling out of the shadows to reclaim his rightful place as an early architect of the English Reformation and a compellingly modern hero.

We first meet Mantel’s Cromwell in 1500, when he’s about 15 (not even he knows his real birthday). A poor, motherless boy, he’s lying in the dirt, broken by a beating from his blacksmith father. Fleeing to the Continent soon after, Thomas becomes a mercenary before sidestepping nimbly into the cloth trade.

Some 10 years later, he returns to England, where he overcomes the rigid class system by transforming himself from a merchant into a lawyer, banker and statesman. Though he’s handy with his fists and has the aspect of a murderer, his heart is kind. His preferred weapon: words.

“He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury,” Mantel writes. By 1527, he’s deploying all those skills as the right-hand man to Henry VIII’s right-hand man, Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor.

These are uncertain times in England. After 18 years of marriage, the king still lacks a male heir and is looking for a way to cast off his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and take another, Anne Boleyn. The plague returns most summers, and fiery clerics are preaching dangerous ideas in London’s dank cellars. The financial markets are jumpy, though Cromwell prospers.

‘Eye for Risk’

“As some men have an eye for horseflesh or cattle to be fattened, he has an eye for risk,” Mantel writes.

Cromwell appreciates what the king’s titled -- and entitled -- aides fail to grasp: that the world is run “not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.”

When Wolsey falls from favor, Cromwell’s moment arrives.

The novel spans 35 years, during which Cromwell rises through offices of increasing importance: Keeper of the Jewel House, Master Secretary and -- oddest to our modern ears -- Vicegerent in Spirituals, someone appointed to exercise the king’s power in religious matters.

Yet personal tragedies accompany his triumphs, making this far more than a tale of rags to political riches. As he bamboozles and bulldozes his way past Parliament, the nobility and the papacy to win Henry the right to remarry, Mantel delves into faith and memory, ambition and statecraft.

Executions and Seductions

There are executions, coronations, seductions; the court hums with intrigue. Erasmus and Holbein pop up in cameos, and Henry and Anne’s daughter, the future Elizabeth I, is depicted as a gingery, lusty-lunged babe often likened to a piglet.

The novel closes in 1535. A weary Cromwell teeters at his zenith, and the country is on the cusp of yet more upheaval. The book’s title reinforces this sense of open-endedness, for Wolf Hall is the family seat of Jane Seymour, who a year later became Henry’s third wife. Mantel is planning a sequel that will take Cromwell’s life through 1540, the year he was beheaded.

“England,” she reflects, “is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground.”

This sense of the past as something mutable lends “Wolf Hall” a boisterous immediacy. Mantel’s previous works have dwelt on topics ranging from psychics and giants to the French Revolution. Though she hews to history here, the story swims in dreams and fables about imps, dragons and serpent princesses.

They crop up in the Arthurian legends that Cromwell’s son loves, and even Wolsey recalls ancient days when kings “married women who came out of the sea or hatched out of eggs.”

Historical fiction at its finest, “Wolf Hall” captures the character of a nation and its people. It exemplifies something that has lately seemed as mythical as those serpent princesses: the great English novel.

“Wolf Hall” is from Fourth Estate in the U.K. and is scheduled to be published by Henry Holt in the U.S. this October (653 pages, 18.99 pounds, $27).

(Hephzibah Anderson is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Hephzibah Anderson in London at hephzibah_anderson@hotmail.com.

Last Updated: April 22, 2009 19:00 EDT