Title: The Pillars Of The Earth
Author: Ken Follett
Year: 1989
Genre: Historical Fiction
The Pillars Of The Earth is the epic first entry in Ken Follett’s Kingsbridge series of historial sagas. It was chosen for my book club’s read this month and was fortunately the book I voted for.
I remembered when I was a teenager there was a 2010 TV series which starred Eddie Redmayne prior to his Hollywood fame and although I did only watch a couple of episodes at the time the book has been one I’ve been interested in reading since then. However I was shocked at the size of the book that I was given at the book club and wondered if I could complete it in a month – most books I read are around 300-500 pages but this one is over 1,000 pages so you are certainly in for an epic story.
It begins with a short prologue where man being hung for an alleged theft, when a mysterious woman arrives at the hanging, heavily pregnant and curses the knight, priest and sheriff who are overlooking the execution as it takes place.
The story then moves 10 years or so into the future and wemeet Tom Builder and his family, Agnes and their two children, Alfred and Martha. Tom is a master stonemason who is building a house for the local landowner William Hamleigh, a knight, and his bride to be, Aliena who is the daughter of Earl Batholomew of Shiring.
However when Aliena announces that she rejects William’s proposal, Tom and his team of builders are fired. This leads Tom to travel the countryside looking for work, although he aspires to work on a cathedral. Meanwhile, William plots his revenge on Aliena and her entire family.
As Tom and his family travel looking for work, he meets Ellen – the woman who cursed the hanging and her young son Jack, as well as a sub-prior named Phillip. Tom also discovers that his wife Agnes is pregnant with their third child.
Phillip is a sub-prior at a small monsatery in the forest. He has been raised in the monastery since he was a small child in Wales and some soldiers came to his families house and killed his parents, with Philip and his brother Francis only being spared when a prior interrupts the men and takes them both under his wing in the monastery. He has turned the small monastery around but when the Prior of Kingsbridge dies, he may have an opportunity that will change his life forever.
Over the rest of the story we follow these main characters as their lives intertwine around the building of Kingsbridge Cathedral, the largest cathedral England has ever seen – against a backdrop of political intrigue, civil war, famine, seiges and more.
This book is definitely one of the most epic that I have ever read with Ken Follett packing the story with a lot of action, intrigue and mystery. Considering the book’s overall length I found the book was a very easy book to read and I struggled to put it down, and the book never descends into being boring.
The book also effortlessly merges the historial and the fictional in a way that the fictional characters actually feel like real people who lived in this time period, with historical events being used to enhance the story and move the plot along very well and has made me want to learn more about the era the book is set in.
All of the characters also have flaws which make them very interesting to read about, even the “good” characters such as Prior Philip have some moments where you wonder if he is too manipulative, especially at one moment in the book where he interferes with two other characters which causes them a lot of misery down the road.
Also Tom Builder has a flaw where his son Alfred is very much the apple of his eye and he is quite blinkered to his bad behaviour, which comes to pass on the other characters towards the second half of the novel.
Meanwhile Aliena at the start of the book does come across as quite aloof and naive and even a bit unlikeable but as the worst happens to her she grows into a strong and confident young woman that you do end up rooting for. I also really liked Ellen and Jack who have had to survive in extremely difficult circumstances.
However the most evil characters in the book have to be Bishop Waleran and William, Waleran for his pulling of the strings and scheming William doing some truely diabolical and violent things throughout the novel.
Now would also be a good point to mention a trigger warning that he engages in a lot of sexual violence and rape through the book, with some of it described quite graphically. Though the descriptions I think are necessary to feel the devestation of William’s actions, I can imagine for some readers it may be too much and there were a few people in book group who didn’t read past these sections for that reason.
In terms of plot points, there are a handful of times where there does seem to be a plot convenience and a little bit contrived, as these are in the second haldf of the book though I’ll put them in an accordion so as not to spoil then.
