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Title: The Pillars of the Earth
Author: Ken Follet
Genre: Historical fiction (medieval)
Thingummies: 3.5
Synopsis: In the twelfth century, the priory of Kingsbridge begins to rebuild their cathedral. It is a project that will take a generation, changing the lives of all it touches, from the builders to the monks, the nobility to the merchants. Fortunes will be won and lost, lives saved and ruined, and history made in the shadow of the growing cathedral.
Thoughts: Historical novels that intertwine with real events always run a number of risks. There is the temptation for authors to place their fictional characters in key points too often, making them repeatedly responsible for being the anonymous turning points of history. One might believe, for example, that a protagonist was the one raise the white flag at Fort Sumter, but it stretches the bounds of belief to think that the same character also shot off Stonewall Jackson’s little finger at First Bull Run and led the charge down Little Roundtop as well. There’s also the temptation for characters to be strangely clairvoyant, warning direly that the Spanish Armada will founder or being the only one to believe Cassandra. Less egregious but no less irritating is the tendency to cover major events that the author does not care about but needs for background information in one or two terse paragraphs that scarcely give the necessary weight to a major battle or the passage of fifteen years.
The Pillars of the Earth walks the border of the first error, mostly avoids the second, and masterfully refuses the third. This is a leisurely paced, well-researched immersion into medieval England. The book covers a good thirty-some years of history, with most of the main events of the time period occurring far away and only the repercussions of those events appearing in the foreground. The clever placement of the various characters in different social strata and political factions allows the background information to emerge naturally, without the need for many plot dumps. One of the main characters, Prior Phillip, does manage to play a critical role in a major real life event near the end, but for the most part, the author manages to insert his characters into real events without insisting that they take center stage. These characters are wealthy merchants and influential builders, lower nobility and mid-level clerics, the kind of people who are deeply knowledgeable about and entangled in national politics without actually being able to influence real events. Instead, they allow the reader a window into the medieval society, not at the court as reflected in history lessons and Shakespeare, but at the level that most people were living.
The plot unfolds slowly, without any particular hurry. It’s rather less an arc than a series of vignettes, where the good guys (the upright prior, the brilliant builders, the damaged but determined wool merchant) and the bad guys (the cruel and rapacious earl, the unscrupulously ambitious bishop) trade victories over and over again through the decades. It wraps up neatly and satisfyingly, as minor events in the beginning of the book come back to haunt characters repeatedly through the rest of their lives.
I found the book deeply interesting, but not as emotionally engaging as I would have preferred. Some of the problem, I think, is that I rather disliked several characters I believe you were supposed to have liked. Tom, the heart of the first half of the book, sleeps with another woman the evening of his first wife’s death. It’s an act that I could not bring myself to forgive him for, nor could I ever warm up to Ellen, the woman he sleeps with. Actually, this is the second time I’ve tried to read this book. The first time, I was rather too young—upon coming to this scene a few chapters in, I was exceedingly uncomfortable and decided to put the book aside. I only picked it up again recently when a copy fell into my hands and I decided to give it another go.
Another problem is the endless melodrama. The good characters are constantly losing everything to the bad characters. They win it back, build it up more, and then the antagonists come riding back, raping and pillaging and burning everything down again. In some ways, it’s realistic—after all, none of us actually live happily ever after. If you stick with someone’s story long enough, they will cycle through good and bad times, as they succeed and fail at various endeavors. But I found the constant circle wearying after awhile. And the level of desperation and despair the characters experience each time becomes overwhelming. It’s certainly appropriate that a person might have four or five points of absolute despair over the course of his or her life. But when one novel covers that entire life, only the most important parts are highlighted. So roughly fifty percent of the time you see each character, he or she is nearly suicidally unhappy. It’s always for a good reason, but you begin to (unfairly) want to tell these medieval characters to cry moar, emo boy.
There’s also rape scenes. A lot of rape scenes. Probably relatively historically accurate, but increasingly unnecessary. The first time William rapes someone, it’s critical to the plot and pretty much drives half of the rest of the novel. But the fifth or sixth time he grabs some poor girl’s dress by the neckline and rips the front off in a strip leaving her clutching the sides together to futilely cover herself (seriously, he does this at least three times out of the half dozen rapes I can remember, having stopped counting), I found myself torn between boredom and discomfort. He’s evil. We get it. He only gets off on women in terror. We know. Please, please, please stop showing us. Also, if you’re going to keep showing us, let’s work on some variety, ok? Those poor dresses.
I very much wanted to know what happened throughout the book. The plot is engrossing, and the detailed descriptions of medieval life are really quite interesting. But I did not particularly enjoy spending time with most of the characters, and was somewhat relieved to finally reach the end to find the mysteries neatly wrapped up and the bad guys gone to their just ends. If only so I didn’t have to read about any more strips being ripped out of dresses.
Author: Ken Follet
Genre: Historical fiction (medieval)
Thingummies: 3.5
Synopsis: In the twelfth century, the priory of Kingsbridge begins to rebuild their cathedral. It is a project that will take a generation, changing the lives of all it touches, from the builders to the monks, the nobility to the merchants. Fortunes will be won and lost, lives saved and ruined, and history made in the shadow of the growing cathedral.
Thoughts: Historical novels that intertwine with real events always run a number of risks. There is the temptation for authors to place their fictional characters in key points too often, making them repeatedly responsible for being the anonymous turning points of history. One might believe, for example, that a protagonist was the one raise the white flag at Fort Sumter, but it stretches the bounds of belief to think that the same character also shot off Stonewall Jackson’s little finger at First Bull Run and led the charge down Little Roundtop as well. There’s also the temptation for characters to be strangely clairvoyant, warning direly that the Spanish Armada will founder or being the only one to believe Cassandra. Less egregious but no less irritating is the tendency to cover major events that the author does not care about but needs for background information in one or two terse paragraphs that scarcely give the necessary weight to a major battle or the passage of fifteen years.
The Pillars of the Earth walks the border of the first error, mostly avoids the second, and masterfully refuses the third. This is a leisurely paced, well-researched immersion into medieval England. The book covers a good thirty-some years of history, with most of the main events of the time period occurring far away and only the repercussions of those events appearing in the foreground. The clever placement of the various characters in different social strata and political factions allows the background information to emerge naturally, without the need for many plot dumps. One of the main characters, Prior Phillip, does manage to play a critical role in a major real life event near the end, but for the most part, the author manages to insert his characters into real events without insisting that they take center stage. These characters are wealthy merchants and influential builders, lower nobility and mid-level clerics, the kind of people who are deeply knowledgeable about and entangled in national politics without actually being able to influence real events. Instead, they allow the reader a window into the medieval society, not at the court as reflected in history lessons and Shakespeare, but at the level that most people were living.
The plot unfolds slowly, without any particular hurry. It’s rather less an arc than a series of vignettes, where the good guys (the upright prior, the brilliant builders, the damaged but determined wool merchant) and the bad guys (the cruel and rapacious earl, the unscrupulously ambitious bishop) trade victories over and over again through the decades. It wraps up neatly and satisfyingly, as minor events in the beginning of the book come back to haunt characters repeatedly through the rest of their lives.
I found the book deeply interesting, but not as emotionally engaging as I would have preferred. Some of the problem, I think, is that I rather disliked several characters I believe you were supposed to have liked. Tom, the heart of the first half of the book, sleeps with another woman the evening of his first wife’s death. It’s an act that I could not bring myself to forgive him for, nor could I ever warm up to Ellen, the woman he sleeps with. Actually, this is the second time I’ve tried to read this book. The first time, I was rather too young—upon coming to this scene a few chapters in, I was exceedingly uncomfortable and decided to put the book aside. I only picked it up again recently when a copy fell into my hands and I decided to give it another go.
Another problem is the endless melodrama. The good characters are constantly losing everything to the bad characters. They win it back, build it up more, and then the antagonists come riding back, raping and pillaging and burning everything down again. In some ways, it’s realistic—after all, none of us actually live happily ever after. If you stick with someone’s story long enough, they will cycle through good and bad times, as they succeed and fail at various endeavors. But I found the constant circle wearying after awhile. And the level of desperation and despair the characters experience each time becomes overwhelming. It’s certainly appropriate that a person might have four or five points of absolute despair over the course of his or her life. But when one novel covers that entire life, only the most important parts are highlighted. So roughly fifty percent of the time you see each character, he or she is nearly suicidally unhappy. It’s always for a good reason, but you begin to (unfairly) want to tell these medieval characters to cry moar, emo boy.
There’s also rape scenes. A lot of rape scenes. Probably relatively historically accurate, but increasingly unnecessary. The first time William rapes someone, it’s critical to the plot and pretty much drives half of the rest of the novel. But the fifth or sixth time he grabs some poor girl’s dress by the neckline and rips the front off in a strip leaving her clutching the sides together to futilely cover herself (seriously, he does this at least three times out of the half dozen rapes I can remember, having stopped counting), I found myself torn between boredom and discomfort. He’s evil. We get it. He only gets off on women in terror. We know. Please, please, please stop showing us. Also, if you’re going to keep showing us, let’s work on some variety, ok? Those poor dresses.
I very much wanted to know what happened throughout the book. The plot is engrossing, and the detailed descriptions of medieval life are really quite interesting. But I did not particularly enjoy spending time with most of the characters, and was somewhat relieved to finally reach the end to find the mysteries neatly wrapped up and the bad guys gone to their just ends. If only so I didn’t have to read about any more strips being ripped out of dresses.
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Date: 2011-04-07 11:43 pm (UTC)From:It's just that so many of the characters did something to make me intensely dislike them. Tom sleeping with Ellen, Ellen pissing on the Benedictine rules, Jack burning down the cathedral--despite the fact that each character is supposed to be sympathetic, I could never quite bring myself to like them again. So Aliena and Philip ended up the only characters I was actually rooting for.