Pillars of the Earth

Ken Follett's epic tome about the constructing of a cathedral in twelfth century England swept me most completely into it's tale. Due to the book's all vastness you can't help but be carried into the world of the characters. The building of the cathedral is told through the stories of the mason constructing it, the prior who will be its head, the bishop and earl who oppose it and the many villagers whose lives are affected. I liked the way Follett provides a lot of detail about how the plans are drawn, the arches made, the stones cut etc. Detail not only about the cathedral but about the lives of the villagers, their markets, their homes. At nearly 1,000 pages it takes so long to read you I felt like I was living there in Kingsbridge with the characters. The political intrigue intertwining of the church and state keeps one from getting bored of the more mundane minutia. It took a lot to build a cathedral - tools, stone, workers, money, food, clothing, the will to get it done and so to tell the tale from start to finish it does take a big book or a TV miniseries. As much as is written about the characters they come off as rather one dimensional. You can always predict what they're going to do, they never seem to grow or learn from the many tragedies that befall them. The characters also seem rather twentieth century but I think that's excusable in popular fiction, it's not written on the level of a piece of great literature so I give the author some leeway. But even as a piece of pop lit the gratuitous sex and violence seemed unnecessary. Yes it was a violent time but that can be conveyed without the graphic murder and rape descriptions. Pillars of the Earth is definitely worth reading for a sense of the period and the details of twelfth century life. Follet is known as a thriller writer and I haven't read any of his other works so can't comment as to how this compares. I do believe he must have spent years laboring over the research and writing and really put his heart into this novel.