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A review by michael_taylor
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
5.0
The Pillars of the Earth was one of the books that made me fall in love with reading when I first read it about ten years ago. I remember loving the world, the characters and the scale of it all. It's a book that I had some trepidation about rereading. Sometimes you go back to a book and it's nothing like you recall and you leave disappointed. Overall, I was pleased to return to this monolithic book.
I like Ken Follett as an author. He knows how to craft an interesting plot, and he knows how to keep things moving. This book is almost 1,000 pages, but it doesn't feel it's length. The idea of a book about building a church in medieval England sounds boring, but Mr. Follett makes you care about the world by writing real characters. The way he writes is fairly simplistic, and easy to follow. This is often a criticism, but I found it helpful in this case. It's a very meat and potatoes sort of book. The good characters are good and the bad characters are bad. It's easy to know where your loyalties are all the time. If you're looking for a book with shades of grey, I don't know that you'd find it here. Again, none of this is really a complaint. At the end of the day, it's a damn entertaining book.
The plot spans several generations and follows several different characters as the protagonist. There's also lots of time spent with the thoroughly repugnant antagonists. William remains one of my favorite antagonists in all of literature. He's the kind of bad guy where you spend the whole book just wishing he'd die. And he's truly awful. He's greedy, entitled and ignorant. And he's a rapist. Lots of sexual violence and descriptions of sex occur in this book.
Every once in a while the grand plot feels a little too convenient, and for how many characters there are in this book, really and truly the author only has an interest in four or five. Returning to this book years later, I was still impressed with how the whole thing doesn't come crashing down. It's like building a cathedral. There's a vision of what it should be, but as you start actually doing this crazy, ambitious project, it takes on a life of its own and becomes something more. There are cracks in the walls, and some parts feel tacked on, but in the end you have to stand back and admire the fact that it actually exists.
I like Ken Follett as an author. He knows how to craft an interesting plot, and he knows how to keep things moving. This book is almost 1,000 pages, but it doesn't feel it's length. The idea of a book about building a church in medieval England sounds boring, but Mr. Follett makes you care about the world by writing real characters. The way he writes is fairly simplistic, and easy to follow. This is often a criticism, but I found it helpful in this case. It's a very meat and potatoes sort of book. The good characters are good and the bad characters are bad. It's easy to know where your loyalties are all the time. If you're looking for a book with shades of grey, I don't know that you'd find it here. Again, none of this is really a complaint. At the end of the day, it's a damn entertaining book.
The plot spans several generations and follows several different characters as the protagonist. There's also lots of time spent with the thoroughly repugnant antagonists. William remains one of my favorite antagonists in all of literature. He's the kind of bad guy where you spend the whole book just wishing he'd die. And he's truly awful. He's greedy, entitled and ignorant. And he's a rapist. Lots of sexual violence and descriptions of sex occur in this book.
Every once in a while the grand plot feels a little too convenient, and for how many characters there are in this book, really and truly the author only has an interest in four or five. Returning to this book years later, I was still impressed with how the whole thing doesn't come crashing down. It's like building a cathedral. There's a vision of what it should be, but as you start actually doing this crazy, ambitious project, it takes on a life of its own and becomes something more. There are cracks in the walls, and some parts feel tacked on, but in the end you have to stand back and admire the fact that it actually exists.