Πριν ξεκινήσω να διαβάζω το βιβλίο αυτό, δυσκολευόμουν να φανταστώ τι το τόσο ιδιαίτερο μπορεί να έχει μια ιστορία που περιστρέφεται γύρω από το χτίσιμο ενός καθεδρικού ναού στη μεσαιωνική Αγγλία, σε σημείο το βιβλίο να αποσπά τόσο διθυραμβικές κριτικές και να έχει κάνει τόσο ντόρο.
Επιπλέον, για μένα, όλα τα βιβλία αυτού του είδους (ιστορική φαντασία στο μεσαίωνα) έχουν και το μειονέκτημα ότι μπαίνουν στη ζυγαριά απέναντι στο ανυπέρβλητο Το όνομα του ρόδου.

Κι όμως...
Η ιστορία είναι συναρπαστική, η γραφή εξαιρετική και οι χαρακτήρες είναι πολύ καλά δομημένοι.
Επίσης, ο τρόπος με τον οποίο εξελίσσεται η πλοκή, κάνει τον αναγνώστη να μην μπορεί να αφήσει το βιβλίο στο τέλος των κεφαλαίων αλλά να θέλει να συνεχίσει και στο επόμενο, ώστε να δει "τι θα γίνει παρακάτω".

Βέβαια, όπως νομίζω ότι έχω ξαναγράψει, η επιτυχία στη "βιομηχανία" του βιβλίου - η οποία δεν διαφέρει σε τίποτα από αντίστοιχες βιομηχανίες θεάματος όπως ο αθλητισμός και ο κινηματογράφος - εξαρτάται από πολλούς παράγοντες, οι περισσότεροι εκ των οποίων δεν μπορούν να ελεγχθούν, με το σημαντικότερο να είναι η τύχη.
Και σίγουρα το βιβλίο αυτό, δεν θα έφτανε στο σημείο να θεωρείται τόσο σημαντικό ανάγνωσμα - ειδικά σε σχέση με άλλα βιβλία του είδους - αν δεν είχε την ώθηση όλου αυτού του συστήματος που ονόμασα βιομηχανία του βιβλίου. Και βέβαια κυρίως αν δεν είχε τύχη.

Σε κάθε περίπτωση, ξαναλέω ότι είναι ένα ανάγνωσμα που αξίζει, ως μια πολύ ωραία ιστορία που καθηλώνει, παρά το μέγεθός της.

There were too many triggers for me but the rest was fantastic! I have been listening to the audio FOREVER!

Mel

I read this several years ago and I am now bringing my review to Goodreads.

I want to share that this was a book discussion selection. We read and discussed this book as a 3 week, library book discussion event! It was an epic experience. Of course, it was a very Large book and at the time, felt it deserved to be broken down into sections so that we could give it the time it deserved for discussion. Most of the regulars in the library book discussion group didn't like reading books that were over 300 pages, so you can imagine what it would have been like for me to ask them to read this book (all 1104 pages) in one week.

(BTW, for those of you who follow me regularly, I led my local library book discussion group for 12 years on a weekly basis. - Yes, we discussed books weekly. Although, typically one of those weeks was devoted to me bringing in a local author - thus, they got at least one week off from reading and didn't have to read the author's book that we were hosting - it was usually an interview/talkback session that I would do with the author.) Side note: We were also supporting selling the authors books at our local author events.

I digress. Back to the review!

For the sake of this review, I will not break this up into a 3 week, session - it will be discussed all in one - right here - right now! ;) Here goes...

Premise: When the cathedral at Kingsbridge burns down, the newly appointed prior hires Tom Builder to manage the rebuild. In order to pay for it, Prior Philip asks King Stephen for the rights to take stone from a nearby quarry and wood from a local forest. This puts him at odds with Bishop Waleran, who wants the wealth owned by the priory. You can already see the conflict arising.

It took awhile for the book to "build" momentum. Or even arrive in Kingbridge to begin the actual building of the cathedral. And with so many characters being introduced there were a lot of people to manage as we got to know what was happening. And in this way, with all those characters, it definitely felt like a relationship book. We get to watch how those relationships play out between the various men and women who meet - become friends - live together - sour - and so forth. (Aliena and Prior Philip, one example.)

Then there are the various threads to the story. How can you not have them in a story this long. Jonathan, as an example was one of those stories, where he was abandoned by his family and raised by the monks. Or Jack. And the earldom of Shirling. And the competition between Aliena's family and so forth. As shared earlier, in a way, it felt like we had to keep a scoresheet to keep up with all the characters.

Still, it was a lovely story in many ways. You couldn't help but connect to the characters and hope for the best. And it was definitely a delight to discuss as a group.

Still...even though, I loved the writing, and the characters, and the experience we had as a book group discussing it, I am not one for large books. And even though I was excited by the thought of continuing on with the series, when I did finally get ahold of "World without End," once I realized it fast-forwarded into the future beyond these characters, I chose not to continue.

I know, I am going beyond this review, by sharing that small point about "World without End," but I was also just sharing why I was not motivated to continue the journey with this series. 4.5 stars rounded down.

When a book offers nearly 1,000 pages of story, I expect, at the least, an epic sweep to the proceedings. Characters of interest are nice; characters with depth--even better. Some insight into the world around us and its many complicated workings would get me thinking--and I really like a book that makes me think. A fully-realized literary landscape--one that takes the reader to a place that can only exist in the printed word--would overjoy me. Big books offer a big promise: check out my story, and you just might get lost in something epic and awesome.

Oh, I got lost in "Pillars," alright--the same way that about 1,000 people can get lost in a full-sized college football stadium. BIG THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN HERE! YOU WILL BE AMAZED! YOU WILL--what? This is the turn-out? Well, alright; since you're here, game on.

One thousand pages and about a fifty-year span of characters and events do not an epic make. Follett gives it his best--and when he is at his best, he writes fiction that is dramatic and easy to read. Unfortunately, he hits this note a finite number of times across the girth of this monster, and each instance lasts for but a few pages before getting lost in all the noise those thousand spectators are straining to make in the stadium.

Sadly, the more effort that Follett puts into the story, the smaller the returns. He throws in Church politics--and out comes a black-garbed villain who furrows his brow and plots evil doings and reaches for the waxed handle-bar mustache that begs to be there; he adds a selfish, landed Lord--and, voila, here is a rapist who can't get it up without beating the object of desire; he posits a visionary mason who wants to be build the best cathedral (ever) that England has (ever) seen--and here are a few elementary descriptions of architecture, along with a group of working-class underdogs that demand your sympathy.

If someone asked me to sum up this book in a single word, I would immediately reply with "obvious." Every character's motivation is tattooed on his forehead, and when opposing characters meet in the story, it is so very frustrating that they cannot just read the writing on the brow. Major events announce themselves well in advance, and their consequences come calling soon after. The themes at work swing through about four degrees of arc and sound a monotonous beat that plays alongside the tick-tocking of the clock and the turn of every page: evil is bad; courage is good; evil is bad; courage is good; evil is bad; courage is good...

For years, various people have recommended this book to me with varying amounts of adulation; and while I am glad that I finally picked it up, I am puzzled by its reception. Yes, it is readable; and yes, there are times when it is good fun. More than anything, however, "Pillars" is mediocre--sometimes relentlessly so. For such a large book, it is a shallow read--even for a mainstream book whose first purpose is to entertain.

Those thousand people giving it their all in that massive stadium? I feel bad for them: they wanted to be part of something epic and awesome--and I was ready to cheer with them.


*******


POSTSCRIPT--A BITCHING SESSION THAT I COULD NOT AVOID

I do not like to hate on a book, and when I write a review for a book that I have issues with, I try to keep things clean. That said, I couldn't let this gripe go. There is one offense that Follett commits in "Pillars" to a flagrant degree: that of inconsistent logic. A single example will serve to illustrate.

In the first part of "Pillars"--which, by the way, runs at about 280 pages in the recent trade edition that has the pretty cover--Tom Builder, the mason who is fated to build a cathedral, wanders throughout England with his family in tow and searches for work. Weeks and months and many dozens of pages go by without work or the hope of finding work, while Tom and his family grow more desperate by the day. Each time Tom and his family come across a sizable church or monastery, Tom asks after work:

Tom Builder (said in a mock British accent): "Please sir, may I have some work?"

Compassionate-yet-helpless Listener: "No work!"

TB (wait, he *is* British): "How about some soup for my family?"

CL: "No soup!"

TB: "But this is a church!"

CL: "Oh, right; ok, soup for one night--and then scram!"

This goes on for pages; and pages; and then more pages--until Tom finally does find work from the one clerical person in all of England who really does give a damn about the Lord and His teachings. Until that momentous, did-ya-see-that-coming-about-200-pages-ago event, it's tough going for Tom, his family, and reader alike.

The inconsistent logic? I'm getting to that.

Fast-forward to page 708, paragraph three, sentence number three (how do I know this? Because, out of all 980 pages, I marked this one with a little fold; why? Because, when I reached said sentence of said paragraph of said page, I just about banged my head against the nearest wall):

...there were a few who were from England originally and might be tempted to move back; and the others would spread the word, for it was every mason's duty to tell his brothers about new building sites.

What. The. Hell.

In the first third of this doorstopper, a main character wanders hither and yon looking for work without any idea of where it may be, while his family starves and perishes in the Winter weather; about a third further in, we learn that masons, in fact, look out for each other; and that they, in fact, keep each other in the know about these kinds of things. So, earlier, when Tom Builder wandered into that town where masons and craftsmen were putting the finishing touches on a cathedral; and when Tom asked after work, only to find out that it had been going on for the past n  ten yearsn, and that the work was nearly finished--we, the readers, should have concluded that poor Tom is at the receiving end of a shit-sandwich line that always has hot, goopy poo for the serving.

Or: Follett really wanted to run his characters through the ringer before giving them something big and important to do, and he didn't worry about any conflict between the actions of his guiding hand and the metric tonne of period research that he fondly remembers in his introduction.

What's it gonna be: an organized workforce that takes care of its own; or a bassackward land of yesteryear where nobody talks any kind of scuttlebutt about anything of importance, leaving each family to figure shit out for themselves or die?

In the words of Eddie Izzard: cake, or death? Well, shit man, gimme the goddamned cake!

END OF BITCHING SESSION, WITH APOLOGIES TO THE AUTHOR

I did not like this book. I finished all 870 pages because I wanted to be a good book club member. If I hadn't had that motivation, I would have dropped it pretty early on. I am going to be very specific with my complaints, so if you're really into the idea of reading this book without being spoiled first (but I really recommend you spend your time reading something else), stop reading now.

The writing is terrible. The prose is simplistic and filled with endless paragraphs of telling-not-showing. The characters are cardboard and mostly stupid. The main villain is sooo villain-y that it's painful. There are no complex antagonists whose humanity you feel all too keenly here à la Guy Gavriel Kay. No, here the main bad guy rapes and pillages and can only get aroused when he's abusing women. And in case you weren't quite sure about where he stands on the Holy Scale Of Goodness Or Badness, the author makes sure he rapes and rapes and rapes again.

Most of the other men in the book, even the "good guys," are particularly terrible. And not in ways that make them complex and interesting and relatable. They are just infuriatingly selfish and obtuse. Tom's wife dies in childbirth and his kids nearly starve to death because he refuses to settle down and work on something reliable but less exciting than his Gloriously Unrealistic Dream Job. Then within hours of his wife dying, he's banging the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Of The Forest who appeared out of nowhere and sat on his boner without preamble. Of course this was written by a man. Aliena's brother and father rope her into serving her brother's own Gloriously Unrealistic Dream Job and she spends the book being walked all over while her brother sits around huffing about how he can't be expected to wipe his own butt, because male reasons.

If it wasn't completely clear that it was a man writing this book, every sex or rape scene contains a rote description of the woman's breasts (almost unfailingly large), and her dark triangle patch of curls. And when I use those specific words, what I mean is that the author used those specific words every time. It feels like Laurell K. Hamilton's copy-and-paste sex scenes where you start to wonder if the author has ever actually been around naked people before.

Aliena is actually even more infuriating than the male characters because her whole reason for existing is to get shit all over repeatedly by men, and I think we're supposed to feel vindicated and triumphant when she finally gets to be happy, but seriously, how cliché and tiresome is the whole, "Woman gets raped and then rises above it, isn't that sooo inspiring?" storyline? And then it gets hammered home when she does finally find happiness that while she had been a successful, wealthy, independent, respected businesswoman, she had actually been empty and emotionless and cold because what she really needed was A MAN TO LOVE HER.

How many ridiculous, overdone tropes are we up to now? I've lost track.

I'm sure that someone will defend this tripe and point out what era it takes place in and cite "Historical accuracy!!!" to excuse it. And that's just a cop-out, because historical accuracy doesn't require writing clichéd, wooden prose and characters. The aforementioned Guy Gavriel Kay writes epic, beautiful books that are everything Pillars Of The Earth wants to be. So if you had been planning on reading this and ignored my spoiler warning and are now cursing my name, just go pick up one of GGK's books instead. You'll thank me for helping you dodge a bullet.

What a book. I don't think I will ever forget the characters in this story. From irredeemably evil, to righteous, to prideful, to forgiving, to resourceful, to kind, to all the traits that make up human's personalities. Even the characters I'd come to love frustrated me in their actions and points of view sometimes. But that's why I loved it. Because despite it being a work of fiction, it felt so real.

I know it's part of a series, and I will definitely read the rest, but if you wanted you could read this book as is. It works perfectly well as a standalone. Expect a story about the lives of a group of people and their friends and families. Expect to see them fall down, persevere, die, love, and face all that life offers, good and bad. And during all that imagine a Cathedral take shape in your mind.

The duck swallows the worm, the fox kills the duck, the men shoot the fox, and the devil hunts the men.
-William Hamleigh, The Pillars of the Earth

This is probably the fifth review I've started for The Pillars of the Earth. The first thing you'll notice is that it's a long read, 900+ pages. Whenever I've attacked a book with similar length I've usually felt that the author was trying to impress me with his big phallic novel, as though the book were really about the size of the book and his ability to produce such an enormous work. This is not true with Pillars.... It starts where it should start, ands where it should end, and everything that happens in between is meaningful.

I have to admit that I bought Pillars... without really knowing anything about it. I knew Ken Follett was an author of books my dad read on planes but that was about it. I had no idea that Pillars... was an Oprah Book Club selection, but found that out shortly after I purchased it (and then I realized that that was the reason Pillars... was front and center when I was browsing.

I bought it because the concept intrigued me. I'm a history dork and a novel structured around the building of a 12th century cathedral is in my wheelhouse. But for the first eighth of the book or so I kept hearing Oprah and my dad talking and making feel as though I shouldn't like the book because I generally don't like what they like. In fact, for a month or so I let their imaginary voices talk me out of reading it altogether and I simply put it down and left it.

After the month, though, I realized that if I didn't pick it up right then I'd lose the story and never read it. So I put my preconceptions out of my head and dug in. And wow, how I was rewarded.

Pillars... doesn't strike me as a book that I'd have been assigned to read in grad school. It's not a heavily intellectual treatise about the inequities of power, or distribution of wealth or something. It's a novel, a story, one well-told. Actually it's many stories that weave in and out of each other. Each story is gripping in its own peculiar way.

One of the most striking aspects about Pillars... is that Follett masterfully heightens the tension and conflict for so long. 900 pages is a really long time to build suspense and he pulls it off on nearly every page. There are so many defeats, victories, and reversals of fortune that you never feel stable, or bored. If a character gets sick you feel there's an equal chance that that character will die, or get better with no affect to the story, or cause a plague that wipes out five more characters. You just don't know. There were many moments when a character's actions made me gasp, sometimes because I was shocked at their malevolence, sometimes because I was shocked at their fate, and sometimes because I was truly happy for them.

And there are some truly malevolent characters. Loathsome in the extreme. It's also surprising how Follett was able to create such truly horrible people without making them cartoonish, or like that evil guy from silent movies who always tied the heroine to the train tracks. They felt real, despicable, but real.

But what knocked my rating up from 4 to 5 stars was that when I'd finished reading, I felt like I'd just read a really gripping best seller that actually meant something. After going all that way when I finally got to the destination there was really something there. It was a good trip that was worth the journey.

And one final thought, after putting Pillars... down for a month (or longer) when I finally picked it up again, I could barely put it down again. I was riveted, edge of my seat riveted.

(below were my initial impressions of the book as I began reading it.)


I just started this the other day. It's not bad, some of the writing is entirely gripping and it's such a monumental effort that there's huge promise. But so far there's been a fair amount of sex and struggles of desire. Normally I'm all about sex and struggling with desire, but this comes across as titillating for an older generation. Like maybe your parents, or people who watch JAG would find it provocative. More later.


ADDENDUM

Okay, so I'm several chapters away from the clumsy sex of the opening chapter. Follet, not surprising, is significantly more interesting when he's weaving his narrative around political intrigue. Significantly. But the point isn't just to dwell in the tower with the power brokers, he wants to be in the dirt with the little people too. And showing how they are connected brings a power to the book because of the way they are handled. I still find the sexuality to be stilted and overwrought, but I'm fascinated by the grand human drama he's able to tease out with from the delicate strands of seemingly small interactions and decisions. I've still got over half a book to read though.

ADDENDUM 2

It's not good that I haven't touched it in several days is it? I just can't get into this book as much as I'd like to.

Kao prvo, ovo je baš dugačka knjiga. Duuuuugačka :P To znači da nije za one bez dosta strpljenja.

Za početak treba da budete ljubitelj srednjovekovne istorije. Da volite da čitate o tome kako se tada živelo (loše), ili bolje rečeno kako se preživljavalo (teško). Da ne bi bilo suvoparno sve je vezano za izmišljenu katedralu u izmišljenom mestu ili bolje rečeno za njenu izgradnju i kako su ljudske sudbine promenjene tj vezane za te događaje. I tu naravno ima svega, muke, tuge, patnje, nasilja, bola, nesreće... i na momente lepih događaja. To mi skoro dođe kao glavna mana, glavne likove koje pratimo, mada pošto je retko ko fin ne i navijamo, stalno prolaze kroz cikluse patnje i posle već pola knjige čovek totalno otupi na sve to i prestane da se uzbudjuje. Znam da je to vreme bilo odvratno za običnog čoveka ali moglo je sve ovo biti bez manje repeticije ciklusa.

Plus knjiga je dugačka ali u ovom slučaju to je možda i previše.Na dosta mesta se ima osećaj tapkanja u mestu kada se radnja uopšte ne pomera. Jeste da je to sve u službi atmosfere ali pretera ga pošto tempo plaća za to pa i moj interes da nekada nastavim dalje.

Sem toga nemam šta drugo da se žalim. Likovi su odlično realizovani, svi se ponašaju i reaguju kako bi očekivao od pravih ljudi, emocije koje osećamo su stvarne i odlično osetimo šta se dešava, ko da smo tamo. I iako je sama katedrala i mesto izmišljena cela knjiga je puna i ljudi koji su postojali i dobijamo uvide u neke događaje kojih je stvarno bilo što je za ljubitelje istorije prava poslastica.

Sve u svemu dobra knjiga i preporuka za svakoga uz upozorenje da se ipak zapita da li je spreman da uloži puno vremena u ovako nešto. Ja pravim pauzu ali ću se vratiti za drugu knjigu.

This book was so completely fantastic that I almost forgot the outside world existed when I was reading it. I’ve never be so emotionally invested in a story, as I was with this. It’s a rare book that does this to me. I think it’s because it follows the characters through such a large proportion of their lives, resulting in a large amount of intimacy and investment with them. Indeed, this novel spans a massive period of forty years and has 1000+ pages; this is no light reading; it is deep, emotive and completely brilliant.

The intense story



So much happens within this novel. It’s impossible to lay it down in a brief summary; these characters, quite literally, go through hell. Such is the life of commoners in the period. They are good folk, and are just trying to erect a church for the betterment of their town. However, the corruptness of the local nobility, and the church hierarchy itself, almost prevents them from achieving their aim. Prior Phillip and Jack the Builder are forced to seek out the aid from their monarch, but because of the turmoil of the civil war, this monarch keeps changing. They have a choice of two royal courts to appeal to. Both are convinced they have the legitimate claim to England’s throne. Picking the wrong side would lead to the ultimate ruination of a folk that simply want to live in peace, and celebrate God’s glory on earth.

Well, this is the mere surface level of the plot. This book is so much beyond it. It is a story of betrayal and seduction; it is a story of love and hardship; it is a story of human nature and the all-encompassing morals that imposes. It is just fantastic in every sense. The characters are real, and their hardships are even realer. These are truly some of the most human characters I‘ve ever read about; these people could have existed.



This is no less true for the villains of the book, William Hamleigh in particular is characterised superbly. For all his ruthless aggression, and sense of entitlement, he’s still a coward at heart. He’d never admit it to anyone, but the reader knows of what he is; the reader can see his blackening yellow heart. He is a product of society, and his parent’s ruthless ambition. He doesn’t deserve sympathy because of this, but the reason why he is the man he is can be seen by looking at his origins. His parents ruined him; he has no restraint; he has nobody to tell him no. So, to his mind, he can get away with anything. He even has a Bishop who will gladly absolve all his sins. He’s actions have no consequences; he can murder and rape without feeling the consequences. This is an incredibly dangerous mind-set, and one that almost destroys the protagonists of the book. He's a nasty man.

The strength of the church

Follet also weighs the potential power of the church. I love the way he contrasts godly Prior Phillip with the twisted Bishop Waleran. It shows us two routes the church could take; it shows us two possibilities for God’s monument on Earth. Prior Phillip is everything the church should be; he is kind and forgiving; he is benevolent and just: he is a true believer of Christ’s teachings. He is in the church for the simple reason that he is a man of faith. Contrastingly, Bishop Waleran is a tyrannical despot. He represents evryhting the church shouldn’t be; he is the personification of its potential evil. The Bishop is vain, greedy and ambitious. In this his will is his own; he is completely self-serving. He abuses his power to meet his own ends and self-aggrandisement. So, he is slightly corrupt. He’s only in the church for its political power and rewards. In this, he is not a true believer of his own faith.

By contrasting these two characters Follet demonstrates how the church has the power to do great good and also great evil. This, for me, is quite a strong message to take from the book because it shows us the dividing nature of man, of life, of good and evil; it shows us that all things can be benevolent or terrible. It also hints at redemption. If something is this bad, it can be made into something good once more; it has the potential to be as it should be in the right hands. I do love this story. It shows that if people can come together, to achieve something greater than themselves then humanity is not lost despite the backdrop of war, corruptness and general chaos.



  

Jack begins the novel as a mute boy with little human socialisation. At the end of the novel he is a respected builder and farther of the town. He is the anchor of Follet’s story telling. Everything centres on Jack, and his family history. His narrative questions the restraints the common man lived under in the period; it highlights the injustice the legal system exerted in the time. He cannot marry his love without a written divorce from his horrible step-brother who’d sooner see him live in misery than have the happiness he couldn’t achieve. The church doctrine almost prevents him from being a farther to his child. But, he perseveres and overcomes the restrictions of the church, his awful step-brother and the corruptness of society itself. Jack’s story is one of human perseverance and fortitude; it is a story of a man who somehow managed to survive a system that was completely against him.

“Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended. ”



This is a phenomenal story, and though that I’ve got hundreds of books I want to read in my lifetime, and little enough time to read them in, this is a book I will definitely be reading again in the future; it’s a story that I simply have to revisit regardless of its vast length. This is a book I just have to read again.

I'm not sure there are words to describe the level of loathing I have for this book. I hated the majority of the main characters. In most cases the hatred was immediate, but there were a few that I thought might be okay.

I was wrong.

Between the cocky, entitled lordling whose head I was forced to share as he grew more and more excited by torturing a man who'd had the audacity to laugh at him . . . and then compared the excitement (b/c torture) to cornering a servant girl in the stables, and the out-of-work carpenter who abandons the baby his wife died giving birth to . . . and those two are only the most memorable in a parade of horrible things. *squints at masses who laud and praise this book*

It literally made me sick to my stomach.

NOT recommended.

5 stars for being a un-put-downable page-turner, full of interesting and engaging characters I empathized with, and for teaching me about the politics and religion of the middle ages. Follet is a thriller writer, and it shows.

Fascinating that in medieval times, most villages were surrounded by walls (or were inside a castle) - because you couldn't count on the law to marauding rival lords from raping and pillaging your village. And the largest buildings other than the local lords castle, were cathedrals. Why did people spend so much time an energy building these huge monuments to God that took 10-20 years to build? The book explains that bit, with the importance of the Church in society and it's relation to the crown.

I am having trouble putting my finger on what I liked about the book. To friends who asked, I can't sell it every well. But it was a epic saga of love and power, and I loved every second. I think in the end, the lesson was that creating enemies leads you to get what you deserve. This might be a good summary of the book:

"The duck swallows the worm, the fox kills the duck, the men shoot the fox, and the devil hunts the men."


For the record, I hate William Hamleigh. I love Jack - he reminds me a bit of Howard Roark. And Aliena was inspirational. Philip was a prude but a good dude - I still can't believe he forgave Remigius. Interestingly, Waleran is once described as good person who just misunderstood his priorities - but I don't buy that.

If O. Henry's reanimated corpse were to write a short story about me, it would go something like this: Matt loved to read, but he was a very slow reader, and spent most of his life accumulating books he never got around to looking at. I know, sad. The practical result is that I'm choosy about the books I read. When I pick up a novel, it's usually a "classic" that I feel I should read, or a novel that's such a part of the zeitgeist that refusing to read it would mark me as a cultural caveman. If this sounds elitist, well, I have to go scrub my yacht before heading off to my Proust-themed cocktail party (berets and pencil mustaches mandatory).

Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth was water cooler fodder 21 years ago. Its sequel is already three years old. In terms of cultural velocity, I’m running neck-and-neck with my mother, who is still trafficking in email forwards from 1999 (take that William Jefferson Clinton!)

Obviously, I didn’t pick up Pillars of the Earth for my typical, admittedly facile reasons. I sort of wanted to read it because it marked Follett’s departure from super-charged thrillers to dense-doorstop sized historical fiction. There was also a burst of nostalgia involved. Follett’s absurdly-detailed sex scenes helped usher my adolescent, pre-Internet self through puberty. Sure, I got the birds and the bees lecture; in fact, I think my parents sat me down in front of a video featuring animated birds and bees in all manner of undress. Afterwards, I still had a lot of unanswered questions. Since I couldn’t simply go online and retrieve all the world’s porn with a click of the mouse, I went to Mr. Follett. (This was probably a good thing; I just did a Google search for “porn” and came up with 157,000,000 results in 0.20 seconds. Pretty sure I would have died if I had seen that as a 12 year-old). Thanks to Follett’s Night Over Water and Eye of the Needle, I was introduced to the concept of oral sex.

Pillars of the Earth is a big, multi-threaded story about the building of a cathedral in England during the 1100s. The story is set in motion by Prior Phillip, of Kingsbridge, who desires to build this cathedral. He is opposed by the devious Bishop Bigod, and the evil Earl William of Hamleigh. He is aided by the good mason, Tom Builder, Tom’s good stepson Jack, and bad son Alfred. There is also Aliena, the beautiful daughter of a former earl, and her brother Richard. All these characters interact throughout the decades that the Kingsbridge Cathedral is being built. They scheme, betray, double-cross and connive; they plot and plan and pace; they sleep together and fight one another; and it all goes on for nearly 1,000 pages. To describe more of the plot would be to ruin what little surprise exists, and also take me far beyond the maximum word count.

The plot here is not typical Follett, or at least the Follett I’m used to; that is, a plot set with the precision of a Timex watch (as in “pretty good” but not Swiss quality). The book doesn’t really build to any climax. Come to think of it, the finishing of the cathedral (yeah, spoiler, they finish it) isn’t really the point. Instead, the cathedral is a seemly focal point around which to unspool a dozen unseemly sideshows. I suppose that makes sense, since unless you're David Foster Wallace, you can't really spend 1,000 pages solely on the construction of a cathedral.

The rhythm of this book can best be analogized to an EKG readout of a healthy person with a normal heartbeat. Imagine the EKG waves rising and falling and then rising again (and yes, I understand that’s not necessarily what an EKG looks like, but it does on E.R., the beginning and end of my medical knowledge). That’s the plot. You start with Prior Phillip encountering a difficulty. He despairs, ponders giving up, and then comes up with a plan. He overcomes that difficulty with the help of his friends. He thinks everything is fine and dandy and starts doing his Walter Huston dance from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Then something goes wrong, and we start over again. After the first few times this happens, all the tension dissipates, and you are left only with your curiosity to see how it ends.

The repetitiveness of this pattern becomes so predictable that you can start foreseeing the problems and the solutions from hundreds of pages away. This is made easier by the fact that the story is like a web. Every strand, every character, is connected (Chekhov would have approved). There is no character, no odd bit of detail, no freighted utterance, that doesn’t pay off somewhere down the line. If you ever start to wonder, “who’s going to suddenly appear to help/make things worse?”, all you have to do is think back to whatever character you haven’t heard from in awhile. This medieval world, you see, was founded on the backs of the peasants, and also on pure coincidence. There is no obstacle on earth that cannot be overcome by the exigencies of a Follett plot. Need to find someone who has left your village and may or may not be in a small town in Spain? Don’t worry, even though it’s the year 1130, you can make your way to the coast, get on a boat, cross the English Channel, travel through France, and find exactly who you are looking for (hint: he’ll be in the place you least expect him to be). And you can do this all in the span of four pages!

The amount of historical detail is amazing. I can imagine Follett hunched over a table in some library, pouring over old documents with a magnifying glass and dreaming of his inevitable Pulitzer. Follett has done his research on medieval masonry and architecture, weapons, clothing, customs, and food. (Horsebread? If it tastes as good as it sounds, I’m in!)

Despite striving for verisimilitude, Pillars of the Earth reads like a contemporary novel. A contemporary novel written by Ken Follett, to be exact. Now, I didn’t expect – or want – a novel written in 12th century colloquial English. If I want to read and not understand fiction from that time period, I’ll pull my copy of Chaucer off the shelf and ignore it, just like I did in high school. Still, this book was so…so modern, it was disconcerting. There’s such a vast canvas here, so much detail, so many pages, I was hoping to get lost in Ye Olde World. Instead, I felt like I’d lost my bearings at a subpar Renaissance Faire.

Follett himself has said he writes “transparent” prose. I don’t know if that gives him too much credit or not enough. Let’s just say I never felt the need to pull out a notebook and copy down a passage that lifted my soul or added to my understanding of the human condition. To his credit, you never get bogged down in a Follett book. He writes downhill, if you catch my meaning (and I’m not sure I do).

One of the glaring problems of Pillars of the Earth is its dialogue. To call it anachronistic would be to assume that it would fit comfortably in some other time period. This is not the case. The conversations had by these characters – stilted, wooden, banal, overly-expository – would be dreadful at any time in the known history of the world. At times, the writing got so egregious I wondered if perhaps Follett wasn’t attempting a meta-critique of the historical novel as a literary artifact. Maybe. I was laughing too hard to ponder this.

I suppose it’s not fair to expect too much from the dialogue, delivered as it is by characters only distantly related to the human race. The “people” in Pillars of the Earth were created by God and Ken Follett solely to service the plot. They have as much personality as the pieces on a chessboard. Their driving motivations are grab bag of clichés: “I want to build a cathedral for God!”; “I want revenge for my dead father!”; “I want to marry that girl because she has curly hair!” Everyone is given their defining character trait, and like fatalistic Calvinists, they ride that trait to their doom or salvation.

For example, there is William Hamleigh. He’s a bad guy. How do we know this? Because he is introduced in a scene in which he nearly tramples a small child with his war horse. Later, he rapes a girl, and makes her brother watch. And that was just a warm-up. He instigates two other gang-rapes that are described in the book, and I’m certain there are several more that appear off-page. Just in case you think William has any redeeming qualities, he also overtaxes his serfs, beats a mill owner, and burns down a village.

To be fair, it’s not as though Follett doesn’t attempt to inject humanity into his characters. In fact, he sometimes devotes entire lengthy paragraphs to their interior lives. It’s just that these interior lives display all the depth of a kiddy pool and all the subtlety of a Hooter’s waitress. Phillip, for instance, has a series of internal debates that flow thusly: (1) Existential quandary: I want to build a cathedral, but that is ambitious, and ambition is a sin; (2) Internal debate: Should I build the cathedral or not?; (3) Resolution: I will build the cathedral, but I will tell myself I am building it for God. Problem solved.

Of course, being a Follett novel, even one with certain pretensions, there are a few smutty parts. (I have helpfully bookmarked these, if you want to borrow my copy). Without getting into details, or excerpting long passages, I will only make note of an odd, fetishistic quirk I noticed , that of the repeated mentions of Aliena’s pubic hair. Every time Aliena takes her clothes off, which happens with some regularity, I might add, the reader is treated to a description of the coiffure of her nether-regions. Now, I’m not against period-specific details as it relates to dress, grooming, or hygiene, but seriously, Ken, it’s not like I’ve forgotten those specific qualities since the last time you mentioned them. The thing that pushes this quirk over the top, though, is how Aliena keeps thinking about it (it is one of her character traits, you see). She believes – and how’s this for anachronisms – that she’s too hirsute. Really? It’s the 12th century! People bathe once a year! It’s not like they hop out of the wooden tub, dry off on a sheep, and then get a Brazilian. Or did they? Everything I know about the 12th century comes from this book.

The end of Pillars of the Earth is a mild disappointment. It is rather passive and indirect. Characters win their rewards and get their comeuppances, but they come via a finale that feels more like an epilogue than part of the story.

Criticizing a Ken Follett book is akin to building sandcastles to hold back the tide. It is a futile exercise. His books will continue to sell millions of copies, and I will continue to buy them at used bookstores years after they have been relegated to semi-relevance. I will never fail to finish one of his novels, and always when I do, my brain will feel the need to take a shower.

At this point, you might be wondering about the four stars. Well, throughout nearly 1,000 pages, I never once thought about putting the book down.