Los pilares de la tierra

Confession time: This is not a book I would have picked out for myself. First of all, look at the size of this kitten squisher! Second of all, Amanda's hate-filled review of it is one of my favorite reviews on Goodreads. However, it's one of my girlfriend's favorite books and when she suggested I give it a read, I knew what was good for me. Lucky for me, I enjoyed it.

Pillars of the Earth is a multigenerational tale about the construction of a cathedral in a fictitious English town in the 1100s. Many threads are followed for it's nigh-1000 page girth. Tom Builder goes from being an expectant father to a widow to a master builder. Philip becomes a prior and the ruler of Kingsbridge. And lets not forget Jack, Aliena, Richard, Waleran, that bastard William Hamleigh, or any of the many other characters.

Ken Follett was primarily known as a thriller writer before Pillars and it shows. Every time things appear to be going right for the good guys and it looks like the cathedral is back on track, another monkey wrench is thrown into the works. For a book with very little in the way of action, I was enthralled. You can squeeze a lot of plot complications in nearly 1000 pages and Follett jammed in as many as he could. I have to admire the kind of planning it took to write something like this.

As I said before, I always found the size of this thing daunting but I probably shouldn't have. It's a best seller, and best sellers aren't known for being difficult reads. Since Follett is a thriller writer, he tended to keep things to the point for the most part, though I thought he was ignoring Elmore Leonard's rule about not writing the parts people skip a few times.

I don't really want to say much about the plot for fear of spoiling anything. It's a long read but the ending is worth the time it takes to get there.

Parting thoughts (may contain spoilers):
- Tom Builder sure jumped into bed with Ellen pretty quickly. Agnes' body wasn't even cold yet.
- Lots of rape in the 1100's
- Since Kingsbridge is fictitious, does that make Pillars of the Earth historical fantasy?
- I really hate William Hamleigh.

Extremely detailed and riveting!

I did not hate this book (hate would be too strong a word, and I can't hate it because I applaud the fact that Ken Follett attempted to write an epic novel). But I did not like it. I didn't like it from the start; his writing style hit me like a brick, but Jim thoroughly enjoyed the book that I kept trying to convince myself that I ought to give it a chance, hoping it would get better. When I was about 500 pages in, he saw how miserable I was and asked why I didn't just stop reading it, but at that point, I was invested in it; I had spent all that time getting that far, that I needed to finish it, and I couldn't wait to come to the end. I kept counting down: "Only 450 pages left; only 300 to go; last 200 pages...yay, I have 50 pages left!" Those fifty pages were the toughest to get through. By the time I was at the end, I thought it was a wasted effort - both on his part and mine.

It's so much easier to explicate on what I did not like because there were so many things:
- I loathed the writing style (he vacillated between pages and pages of highly complex architectural discourses to third-grade level simple sentences grouped into short paragraphs). Sometimes it was bearable. Other times, I wanted to pull my hair out. There were times when I felt the only time he came alive as an author was when he was discussing architecture, but these parts were so didactic in nature that it couldn't hold my interest for long periods of time.
- I did not like the author's narrative style. He had to tie everything together (causality was so prevalent throughout the text that I wondered how he didn't work in how the killing of a fly affected events 60 years later). Every single storyline was wrapped up - too neatly for my liking, in some cases. Everyone was tied to someone else (it was like playing Six Degrees); every single character had to have a denouement; every little plot twist had to be explained; closure had to be achieved, no matter how preposterous the circumstances, over time and space.
- The characterization was poor. In fact, it was appalling how two-dimensional these characters were. Good people were good. Bad people were loathsome. As time went on, the good were always suffering one thing or another; they were put upon; they were harrassed; they were constantly challenged and put to the test like Job (something Follett actually used as a sermon!). The badfolk became more oppressive over time; they were not only detestable, but they had absolutely no redeeming qualities. And to go with a typical medieval stereotype, the good were always excessively beautiful, honorable, intelligent (geniuses or savants, even!) - and if they weren't rich, they would be at the end (I half expected Havelok the Dane and his refrigerator mouth to pop up somewhere, proving once and for all that in the medieval period, to be good was to have the purest light shining out of your mouth each time you opened it). Nevertheless, the bad became uglier, became more despotic, scheming throughout life to get the better of their enemies (the goodfolk). But in the end, good always triumphed over evil; those who could, repented and were forgiven. Those who couldn't, were killed off somehow, because apparently, death is the only way an evil person gets his (or her) dues. And then everyone had a happy ending. I hate happy endings when they're so obviously contrived. And this work was so elaborately, exhaustively, thoroughly contrived. (Maybe it's not too late for me to change my mind and say I hated it. *grin*)
- Historically speaking, there was so much left to be desired. Granted, this novel was written two decades ago, and there have been new discoveries about the medieval period since Follett started his research. But he got it all wrong anyhow. His idea of medieval life was so...off, that it hurt my head to continue reading sometimes. I had to pause periodically and rant to Jim about what I currently found off-putting (for example, there weren't many literate people at the time; at the time this novel was set, there was still a distinct divide between England and Wales; reading and writing were two separate skill sets, and people who knew how to read did not necessarily know how to write and vice versa; orality was a prevalent part of storytelling back then and books not so much and yet somehow, he conflated much of both; manuscript writing was either orally dictated or copied tediously by the monks - his concept of a scriptorium was incomplete, defective - and there has been so much written about this that it saddened me; he used modern translations of medieval poetical/verse works and couldn't explain even alliterative verse form effectively - I even wonder if he knew what it was; his understanding of the languages of the period - Old English, Middle English, Latin, Norman French, Old French, Middle French, etc. - and what was spoken by the aristocrats vs. the peasants vs. the growing middle classes disgusts me; he showed a lack of understanding of medieval law, medieval rights, the social classes, gender roles, even the tales and legends of the period, in both England and France; priests were quite low on the totem pole, in terms of the religious hierarchy, and were quite disparaged yet somehow, that didn't quite come across in this novel...I could go on and on, but I won't).

And the historical part of the novel I just found lacking. There are enough histories and chronicles, contemporaneously written, of the time, that he did not have to deviate much from history. There is so much written about the period between the death of Henry I through the civil wars between the Empress Matilda and King Stephen, to the time that Henry II ascended the throne (including the martyrdom of Thomas a Beckett), that I don't quite understand how he couldn't have mined the chronicles for better material. I understand that this is why it's called historical fiction, and that there will always be some element of fiction interspersed with historical fact. But the fictional aspects usually have to do with surrounding characters and situations that bolster the history. The fiction is not necessarily to the history itself. Many times, when writing historical fiction, the author has to beware the pitfalls of creating a revisionist retelling, interspersing his or her own ideals or beliefs of what should have been to what was. If this novel had been marketed as a revisionary narrative, it would have been okay. But it wasn't. I'm just glad that the historical aspect of the novel just served as the background and not the real story. Because then, I probably would've stopped reading.

The premise was a good one and held a lot of promise. It could've been a great historical epic had it been handled by a more assured writer. By someone who was more of a visionary, someone who had the patience to do exhaustive research or who knew how to craft richly developed characters. It needed an author who understood the epic genre, who knew how to mold the epic, who knew how to keep the narrative going, seemlessly binding time with narration and the human condition, without resorting to stereotypes and grating drama. And most importantly, it needed someone who understood when the story had been told; that while there will always be other stories to tell, that each book has its own natural end, and that these stories may not belong in this book.

Ken Follett may be a bestselling author of suspense novels (and even historical fiction such as Pillars of the Earth and World without End), but he is no writer of epics. Compared to writers of historical fiction such as Edward Rutherford, James Michener, Bernard Cornwell or Margaret George, Ken Follett has a long way to go.

A very long story that never loses pace. Follett has applied his understanding of the thriller to a great historical novel. If you've ever look at one of those stupendous cathedrals and wondered how they came to be, this is the book for you.

Ahem.
"Pillars of the Earth" is a very long book. It's got a lot of soap-opera-like twists and turns - no amnesia, but just about everything else, including mistaken identities, illicit marriages, illicit lack of marriage, illegitimate children, questionable parentage, love triangles, revenge, greed, power, a few murders, rape, witches, politics, knights, swords and horsies. OK, that last bit is not so soap-opera-like. There's also lots and lots of architecture. And it's a very long book.

Main story follows a single family of stone masons for (roughly) three generations, and the extended families associated with re-marrying, etc. Around this family revolves an aspiring monk/prior, a powerful but morally questionable bishop, a ruthless Earl (title, not name), and several kings. The thing is, even with all the re-marrying and such, there are so many evolving inter-relationships between these main characters as the struggle for political power unfolds, and of course everybody grows up, has children, etc - that EVERYTHING seems to happen to this small group of people. And just when you think things have settled down for a while, something else happens, or attempts to happen. And these things keep happening for approximately 980 pages.

Along the way, you learn a lot about medieval culture - particularly the role of religion, the political power of a monestary, priory, or diocese - how life is funded, and just how much it sucks to be a serf. There's also quite a bit of focus on the reason for, and the means to, building cathedrals - Follett muses in his Foreward that one of the things he never could understand is why people in such destitute times would have put so much energy into buildings of such scale, and this book addresses that. You also learn a lot about architecture and the evolution of cathedral-building. I can also now tell you the difference between a nave, chancel, transept, cloister, and clerestory. Oh, and probably 7 different words for "horse".

Really though, I very much enjoyed it, despite its very lengthy nature. Very full of words. Long. Not a day went by I didn't read at least 50 pages (note - at that rate, it will still take about 3 weeks to finish).
The building is a constant, its a reason to keep the central family of masons from wandering off and having more illicit marriages, and its a reason for the ongoing political power struggles. It's essential, but it's not distracting, and the cathedral is not the focus. The people are. They're engaging, you feel for them, you assign labels (good, evil) you change labels several times (he's pretty self-serving and conniving for a "good" guy), and you constantly wonder just what more can possibly happen to these people. There's also an underlying mystery that keeps you wondering... right up until 100 pages too soon.

My only complaint is this - the big climax occurs, the mystery is revealed, it all comes together - and there are still 100 pages to go. The last part of the wrap-up, the rise and fall, takes a while, has an interesting but probably unnecessary historically accurate reference to English church vs. king to give the whole novel an air of "this could have really happened in some obscure English medieval village somewhere, I wonder which cathedral this is supposed to be? Can I go see the real thing?" But it loses momentum right at the very end. Loose ends nicely tied up, but it wasn't the gripping page turner it had been in the first 900 pages. By that time, though, you've got so few pages in your right hand you just keep going because the end is in sight.

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.

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.

5/5

An absolute masterpiece of historical fiction. Inspiring, captivating, and epic.

The Pillars of the Earth is an epic story that had me completely riveted from start to finish. The book's glowing reputation made this a must read, and I am so glad that I did so, because this is one of the best books I've ever read in my life. It simply amazes me what compelling writing and characters can do for a book. The mere idea of a story following the construction of a cathedral just seems like it would become a dull affair, especially for a novel of this size. However, the characters and gripping plot bring so much to this story, to epic heights I never imagined possible.

Pillars has quite a cast of characters. Prior Phillip, being my favorite, Aliena, and Jack make for richly compelling protagonists, while the always scheming Waleran Bigod and the vile William Hamleigh are some of the most infuriating (in a good way) antagonists I've read in a story. Each of their journeys are crafted and interwoven so expertly well. The plot itself is immaculate. There were numerous chapters in Pillars that I simply could not stop reading. I don't think I have been so engaged in a plot like this in many years, even among the very best books that I've read. This was a complete masterclass in pacing.

On the audio side, having both read/listened simultaneously, John Lee's narration is superb. I thought he offered plenty of emotion and really captured the voice of each character without the necessity of going over the top. Lee instantly became a favorite narrator, as he brought Prior Phillip to life for me. Sometimes there just isn't a better bonding in storytelling than a masterful writer/author and a passionate narrator.

I urge anyone and everyone that already hasn't done so, to take the time to read The Pillars of the Earth sometime in their lives. It truly does exceed its reputation. The story will sink its claws into you, and you'll be surprised just how quickly you'll be reading through a near one thousand page story. I've been very fortunate to have read two wonderful books back-to-back with Pillars and Shogun, as they have instantly anchored themselves into my top 3 reads of all time. They are inspiring, captivating, and above all else, give a true sense to the word, epic. This is why we read fiction, for genuine masterpieces like these.