Rob Blackhurst

After twelve months and six hundred pages, I've finally reached the end of Wolf Hall Hillary Mantel's marvellous epic based around the life of Thomas Cromwell.

Mantel has been fielding offers from Hollywood, but, even if Wolf Hall was given the full BBC/HBO box-set treatment, no costume director will be able to evoke the fully realised world that Mantel gives us here. There are digressions on the smell of fat when a martyr is burned at the stake; the scent of Tudor herb-beds at dusk; and the sight of bowls of bad "pottage" – a kind of rough stew – that were standard fare in cheap Calais bars circa 1530.

Some scenes are so arresting that they seem to have been written with a cinematic eye: – a humiliated Cardinal Wolsey floundering in the mud while disembarking from a barge at Putney; the scenes of Henry hunting with his mistress in the autumn mists, and the fondness of Thomas More for scourging his own flesh as well as that of dissenters. But the discussions about Tyndale's English bible, the fate of the Holy Roman Empire, and the interior monologue as Cromwell scrabbles up the social ladder from blacksmith's boy to the King's most powerful servant, are full of depths here that glossy confections like the BBC's "Tudors" barely touched.

Much has been made of Mantel's boldness in rehabilitating Cromwell from his schoolbook reputation as brutish apparatchik into a renaissance man, an admirably secular pragmatist who is far more attractive than the priggish Thomas More.

But perhaps her greater boldness is in rescuing historical fiction from its reputation for pulp. Wolf Hall at times feels like Middlemarch – a slow journey through a fully realized fictional world - with fascinating byways and alleys that seem as crooked as a fifteenth century street-map of London. It's a literary novel with a narrative as gripping as any airport fiction. And Mantel's already half way through a sequel.