The Pillars of the Earth (1989) by Ken Follett

Pillars succeeds mostly on its strong re-creation of the time period. British history is so populated by sheer event that it's almost impossible to pick a single time period in the past thousand years and have it not offer a compelling setting.

Follett is a strong writer of historical fiction. His setting rings true and offers an ample amount of historical education in addition to the page-turning quality of his narrative. Historical fiction has always been partly of an educational nature to me; something akin to a textbook repurposed into a more easily consumable morsel, and Pillars succeeds in this.

The story starts strongly and offers an ample bevy of narrative hooks; Tom Builder's struggle to provide for his family during a time of civil strife is something nearly every adult is able to identify with, and Prior Phillip representing the enlightened clergyman is a nice change from the somewhat more common cliche of the manipulative, greedy character (almost always a Bishop or Pope) we tend to see in depictions of dark age priests in contemporary historical fiction. And intelligent characters are always enjoyable to read, in which we have Jack Jackson to float our leaky, dirty twelfth-century boat.

However not all of the characters succeed. Despite Jack's admirable intelligence and his victimhood to bullying at the hands of his step-brother, I actually found him somewhat more empty than I had wished for. He's easy to root for, but I had trouble identifying with his character. Follett's knowledge of architecture is obvious, but the use of so much jargon was above my understanding at times, and I think Jack's character relies strongly on his infatuation for mathematics, art, and architecture, which was something I was unable to grasp at times.

Stronger offenders, though, were the villains of the story. William Hamleigh was such an obvious target for the reader's hatred, but I found most of his sadism utterly unrelatable, and found his narration rather flimsy and insincere as a result. There's nothing William really wants or is driven by; he seems to exist just to cause suffering for others. I believe there was room for more characterization in his mother, too, who seems the most compelling of the bunch of villains we have, but so little time is spent with her and she remains not much more than an interesting but thin force to the narrative. Ditto to Bishop Waleran, who, with just a bit of foundation in the form of past motivation peppered through the narrative, could have accomplished more than just being the nakedly ambitious clergyman.

Pillars is an enjoyable book, and it offered a nice break to some of the denser, more difficult literature I've been attempting to tackle lately. And it's a really solid example of historical fiction. But it's not one of my favorites as it feels rather thin in certain areas, despite its paciness and its strong narrative hooks.

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