A daily review of books worth your time
More like this
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth builds an entire twelfth-century world around the construction of a single cathedral, and somehow makes laying stone the most gripping thing imaginable. It's a massive, propulsive medieval epic of ambition, faith, war, and revenge that earns every one of its thousand pages.
The Review
On paper, a novel about building a cathedral in medieval England sounds like homework. In practice, The Pillars of the Earth is one of the most purely engrossing big books you can pick up — a thousand-page saga that readers tear through in a week and then mourn when it ends. Follett centers it on Tom Builder, a mason who dreams of raising a great cathedral, and on Prior Philip, the idealistic monk who becomes his patron, and from those two ambitions he grows a sprawling cast of nobles, outlaws, craftsmen, and clergy whose fates tangle across half a century of English history. The genius of the thing is that Follett makes the cathedral itself the engine of the plot: every betrayal, marriage, famine, and feud bends back toward the question of whether that impossible building will rise.
What keeps the pages turning is Follett's old-fashioned command of story. He is a master of the cliffhanger and the long game, planting a grievance in chapter three and paying it off four hundred pages later, and he understands that an epic lives or dies on its villains. William Hamleigh and the scheming Bishop Waleran are gloriously hateable, the kind of antagonists you read on just to see thwarted, and the slow accumulation of their cruelties makes the eventual reckonings deeply satisfying. The book runs on a clean moral engine — builders and dreamers against takers and tyrants — and there's an honest, unpretentious pleasure in watching it pay out.
The period detail is the other great pleasure. Follett is fascinated by how things were actually made — how a wall is raised, how a vault holds its own weight, how a market town grows up around a building site — and he conveys it all without ever stalling the story. The civil war between Stephen and Maud, the politics of the Church, the precariousness of ordinary life when a bad harvest or a powerful enemy could ruin you: it's history made tactile and immediate. You finish the book feeling you've lived in the twelfth century rather than read about it.
It is not a subtle novel, and it doesn't try to be. The characters tend toward the clearly good or the clearly wicked, the prose is workmanlike rather than lyrical, and Follett's handling of sex and violence is blunt enough that some readers find a few scenes gratuitous. This is commercial historical fiction operating at the top of its form, not a literary character study, and going in with that expectation is the difference between delight and disappointment. Judged as the immersive entertainment it means to be, it rarely puts a foot wrong.
For readers who want to disappear into a long, richly detailed historical epic — all ambition and intrigue and hard-won triumph — The Pillars of the Earth is close to the platonic ideal. It's the book to hand someone who says they don't have time for a thousand-page novel, because it reads faster than books a third its length. Grand, addictive, and surprisingly moving, it's a feat of pure storytelling.
Reviewed by Avery
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.