★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: The Pillars Of The Earth
• Author: Ken Follett
• Pages: 973
• Year: 1989
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Publisher: New American Library
• ISBN 978-0-451-22524-5 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Intro

Having already read Follett’s The Key To Rebecca several years earlier, when I saw The Pillars Of The Earth at a library book sale for just pennies, I scooped it up. But it was so massive that I left it on my to-read shelf for quite some time (a year and a half). Now I wish I’d read it sooner.

As I mentioned in my review of The Key To Rebecca, I first heard of Follett due to his penchant for very brief, scene-setting opening lines, and this book was no exception:

“The small boys came early to the hanging.“

The Pillars Of The Earth, nothing like the spy thrillers Follett was previously known for, is epic historical fiction. Set in the 1100s, in England, it covers a full lifetime of events, relationships, famines and storms, wars and intrigue, marriages and deaths and survival. At the center of the narrative is the building of a fictional cathedral at Kingsbridge. (Wikipedia says the town is fictional too, but England actually has a town called Kingsbridge which existed at the time, but is apparently not the town that Follett meant.) The primary characters are Prior Phillip of the Kingsbridge monastery, the family of Tom the Builder, and William of Shiring.

It became Follett’s best selling book of his career and was made into a TV miniseries in 2010.

 

Praise

For a book so large, it reads incredibly quickly — I surprised myself by finishing it in just eight days, ripping through nearly 300 pages on my final day. (Such a pace would have been normal for me in the 1980s and ‘90s, but this far into my adulthood it’s rare for me to read a hundred pages in a single day.) The prose is, for the most part, accessible and clear.

I’m no historian, but the description of the time period felt accurate to me, and each time I paused to look up something I doubted, Follett had written it correctly. The hovels lived in by peasants and workers, the wooden and stone houses of wealthier people, the churches and castles and walls — all of these were accurately described, down to the dirt floors. The foods and clothing and practices and superstitions were the same, including that it was common for many people to only bathe twice a year.

The people in the story were mostly fictional, but they were set into the very real historical time period between the sinking of the White Ship (1120) to just after the murder of archbishop Thomas Becket (1170). Each of the primary characters is given a plausible backstory that helps explain his or her motivations, and Follett switches between their perspectives repeatedly throughout the book. He expertly disguises his history lessons as natural-sounding dialog or brief exposition and scene-setting.

I also thought Follett did an amazing job of portraying the beliefs of the various Christian characters, given that he himself is an atheist. It’s always impressive to me when an author can accurately describe the fervent beliefs of others, beliefs not held by the author.

 

Points Off For...

The only thing I’m removing points for are the couple of rape scenes. Yes, they were likely accurate for the times, and yes, they were not gratuitous (they actually served purposes in the plot), but for my tastes they went on overly long and the author seemed overly enthusiastic about describing them in detail. There were also a number of non-rape sex scenes that went on even longer and in even more detail, and those too bothered me — though I can’t say exactly why. Maybe it my very stiff and puritanical upbringing, or maybe it was the thought of some old guy at a typewriter, gleefully pounding out those pages.

I’m not removing points for it, but there were times when the shifting narrator perspectives tricked me. One moment, I’m reading from the perspective of Earl William and the next section is told from the perspective of Prior Phillip, without any warning of the switch.

 

Conclusion

The book was enjoyable in many ways, and was an excellent diversion from my normal fare. I look forward to someday reading the sequels (World Without End and A Column Of Fire), and I’ve already bought the prequel, The Evening And The Morning, published this year.

Though historical fiction isn’t my wheelhouse, this one seemed very well done.

 

 

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