Rarely has the Booker Prize got it so gloriously, marvellously right as this year in awarding it to Hilary Mantel’s eleventh novel, Wolf Hall. The blot slowly spreading over the fabric of the prize’s reputation for never having shortlisted an author of her calibre has been magicked away. The shortlist, which also included A. S. Byatt, J. M. Coetzee, Adam Foulds, Simon Mawer and Sarah Waters, was the strongest in recent memory; all substantial, deeply intelligent works of literary fiction, the finest of this year’s crop. But nothing like Wolf Hall, an astonishingly imagined account of Thomas Cromwell from his shadowy origins as a Putney blacksmith’s son to his elevation as righthand man of Henry VIII, exists in contemporary English writing.

For a start, the period is so intensely inhabited, the gleeful tearing-up of the rules of how historical fiction is or should be written so radical, so convincing, that it takes a while to see what Mantel has done. And what she has done is to change that hoary old genre for ever and redrawn its contours. Those who mouth tired orthodoxies about how historical fiction is about bodkins and doublets and zounds and codpieces need only take the measure of the balance that Mantel has achieved between familiarity and otherness, then and now, research and imagination.

I cannot imagine a book farther removed from docudrama, costume drama and all the error-strewn, cliché-riddled, library-smelling, ruffs-and-corsets-fest that historical fiction summons to mind. Instead, it fuses a Jamesian free, indirect style with a restrained stream of consciousness to come up with a narrative point of view that gets Cromwell’s subjectivity spot on.

It gives unique access to the mind of someone who was the bureaucrat-architect-enforcer of the English Reformation and yet keeps something private and unknowable away. It speaks of power and its ever-morphing corridors with utter conviction. It is witty, acerbic, original, funny, scintillating, its prose a thing of unalloyed joy. It takes you to a place where you have never been: surely the first requirement of fiction. And at 650 pages it is the swiftest, most gripping book you’ll ever read.

Wolf Hall takes us up to Thomas More’s execution in 1535 so there is another five years to come, before Cromwell himself is executed. I, for one, will be living only a pale shadow of my life in expectation of the next instalment.

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