This was probably my parents favorite book, which they had both independently read before they met. They fawned over it for years, and I have been listening to them fawn over it for years. The expectations were pretty high, despite the fact that neither of my parents have what I would consider to be good taste in literature. I might not have ever gotten around to reading it were it not for the fact that it is one of those books that reddit seems to gush about either.
Reddit is why I read Blake Crouch, Andy Weir and Hugh Howey. Reddit doesn’t have a good track record.
If you didn’t know, The Pillars of the Earth is about the building of a cathedral. That’s the plot as my parents surmized it for the better part of thirty years. It is a captivating idea, particularly if you grew admiring historic architecture. But there was another thing both my parents said about the novel: “But the details!” they would cry, as if ‘building a cathedral” were not enough. Ah yes, the details.
The book is very well detailed, and I have two issues with this.
The first is that I breezed through the first quarter of this book and not one god damned cathedral brick had been lain, and I was starting to be convinced that this was going to turn into some George R.R. Martin bait and switch, and that I would learn that there would be a few more books before anything actually happens. I was at 40% when some characters finally went to a fucking quarry for stone!
The second issue is that these details did a lot to start breaking immersion and the narrative sweep at points in the book. I started to wonder why the details were there, and it seemed to me that a lot of them were just merely because the author had done his research. For instance, during a monastery fire, after learning that monks were safe and secure one of the people in charge orders someone to go rescue the books, leading to an observation such as (my apologies, I didn’t write it down while reading and I couldn’t be bothered to look it up) ‘the books must be rescued from the dinning room where the monks read them after their evening meal’. It’s fucking horrific because that is not how people think, and it certainly not how people think during an emergency. Things like that make you in turn doubt other details, such as when Tom Builder is speaking about the expected cost of building the cathedral, and the head of the church has ‘just done the figures’.
I am not entirely sure that dude spent a lot of time running excel. But what do I know? I didn’t do the research that Follett did.
I read this and I doubted the details. At the 50% point of the book, they are still arguing the details of quarry ownership, and one character explains to another that there is a mill the king owns, and the peasants that work the land have to use that mill, and pay a tax to the king for use of the mill, its use affects the king’s profit-
Is that what people were discussing back in those days? Good fiction is about the details, but some of these details are starting to look like an obvious brushstroke in a painting. I could be entirely wrong, but just from my vibes based understanding of that period of history, people did not refer to ‘the king’s profit’.
You keep reading, and you keep doubting, enough to pirate a PDF to write this review:
Now, as they began to eat, Raschid asked Jack: “What have the philosophers taught us
this week?”
“I’ve been reading Euclid.” Euclid’s Elements of Geometry had been one of the first
books translated.
“Euclid is a funny name for an Arab,” said Ismail, Raschid’s brother.
“He was Greek,” Jack explained. “He lived before the birth of Christ. His work was lost
by the Romans but preserved by the Egyptians–so it comes to us in Arabic.”
“And now Englishmen are translating it into Latin!” Raschid said. “This amuses me.”
Jack was living in a fucking cave at the start of this narrative. Sure, he might have been a young boy, but something about this dialogue feels to strongly of people with a lot of modern education to buttress it all together. It felt fake. As did this one:
“My country is called Africa,” the Saracen replied. There was more than one country in
Africa, of course, as Philip knew–although most of the villagers did not–and Philip wondered
which one this Saracen came from. How exciting it would be if it were a place mentioned in the
Bible, such as Egypt or Ethiopia.
A little girl reached out a tentative finger and touched his dark-brown hand. The Saracen
smiled at her. Apart from his colour, Philip thought, he looked no different from anyone else.
Encouraged, the girl said: “What’s it like in Africa?”
“There are great deserts, and fig trees.”
“What’s a fig?”
“It’s… it’s a fruit, that looks like a strawberry and tastes like a pear.”
Philip was suddenly struck by a horrible suspicion. He said: “Tell me, Saracen, what
city were you born in?”
“Damascus,” the man said.
Philip’s suspicion was confirmed. He was angered. He touched Jack’s arm and drew him
aside. In a quietly furious voice he said: “What are you playing at?”
“What do you mean?” Jack said, trying to play innocent.
In the excerpt above, the person who makes modern feeling error of saying “My country is Africa” is the very same Jack working at his Euclid mere pages earlier.
You keep doubting. People seem very ambulatory and transient. Were people like that back then? I have no idea. It seems weird.
I don’t read a lot of historical fiction, but I imagine this is one of the challenges of that genre. Umberto Eco’s lazy machine suggests that our brain fills in the details when sentences are vague. A sentence reads “the family went to bed” and because of my background I imagine them all slinking off to their own individual bedroom, or maybe a shared one for the kids. But if I were describing my barbarian, Alps-dwelling ancestors, in some frozen mountain hut, the kids might all be cuddled together in one corner of the room, with the parents in the other. Whatever. A good historical fiction writer has to address these discrepancies in some way. I am just not always sure Follett knocked it out of the park in his attempt. A bit too often, like with the monastery fire example, the detail was breaking the spell.
For what it is worth much of the detail work is well crafted enough that it paints a pretty lovely picture of the world. Its why people get sunk into this thing.
Memory is weird. I might be mistaken, but I could have sworn my parents spoke ceaselessly about how detailed this book was regarding the construction of the fucking Cathedral. I could have sworn that is how everyone talked about this book. And of course I would have been fine if this story were the story of some semi-important figures that lived around a cathedral during the course of its construction. But that somehow really doesnt feel like what happened here. I really felt like Follet did characters the same way the fictitious Apreture Science did science – that is he threw characters against the wall and saw what stuck. Ultimately, the most time is spent on Jack and Aliena, whose love is strong enough to move the plot along. The ‘will they, won’t they’ of their romance flings Jack off to distant Arab held Spain, with Aliena and their child following behind him some time later, and it was at this point that I realized I was never going to get my Cathedral book, and that I had been bamboozled.
At this point a normal reader might have just accepted the story for what it was, but I was hundreds of pages invested into a romance that I thought was silly, and I just wanted them to get back to Kingsbridge and finish this fucking Cathedral. But no! Some busy body now won’t let Jack and Aliena get married, and the book is starting to hint at Jack’s parentage…
Which is when I began vowing that if they do a John Snow with this character I will throw a copy of this book at Ken Follett.
For all my insistence, I didn’t actually like and of the Game of Thrones books, and Pillars of the Earth helped me understand why. Games of Thrones promises you dragons, but you get more dragon based discussion then you ever do actual fucking dragons. I suppose someone is now going to tell me that the real cathedral was the friends we made along the way, but I still feel cheated. I know I’m harping on a point that makes me sound like a child who hasn’t gotten his way, but if to take this exact story and instead make it about the political ups and downs about a village along a river with a mill and a market, you could rewrite this story without much editing. And you would never say this book is about a river.
Historical fiction is not my genre. I remember feeling inspired to try my hand at writing some historical fiction after finishing Mark Mazower’s Salonica: City of Ghosts, specifically that period of Thessalonian history where, according to Mazower, you need 5 languages to be a functional citizen of the city. This would have been when both the Ottoman’s and the Venetians were fighting over the whole Mediterranean. An utterly fascinating set of circumstances, or period of time can be interesting, but not a good idea for a novel. My idea would suck. But so would an actual book about the actual construction of a cathedral. It might make for a cool graphic novel though.
Failures in Polymathy 