REVIEW: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Trigger warning:
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Content warnings:
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Dear Ken Follett,
I started reading this, your historical saga set in twelfth-century England, because a friend of mine has been mentioning it for years as one of her favorite books by one of her favorite authors. The book had some good qualities but eventually I had to quit for reasons mentioned in this review.
But first, a plot summary.
The story concerns the building of a cathedral in a fictional English town called Kingsbridge. The novel, at least the part that I read, has two main characters: Tom Builder and Father Phillip, a monk.
Tom has dreamed of building a cathedral for years, ever since he apprenticed to a man who did. As the book begins, Tom is working on a house for a noble couple about to marry, William Hamleigh and Lady Aliena, the daughter of the earl of Shiring. The marriage falls through though, when sixteen-year-old Aliena announces that she will not marry William, and Tom loses his job.
Tom and his family (his wife, Agnes, and his children, fifteen-year-old son Alfred and seven-year-old Martha) are forced to wander in search of other employment for Tom. On their journey, they run out of food and Agnes, who is pregnant, dies giving birth to her and Tom’s third child. Without milk the baby will die, and Tom cannot provide for him in any way since he, Alfred and Martha are already starving. And so he abandons the baby. Some hours later, though, he regrets it, but when he goes back to find his child, the baby is gone.
Tom soon (very soon, more on that later) takes up with Ellen, a woman who lives in the forest and who nurses him and his two children. Ellen once cursed a priest who executed her lover, and has had to hide in the forest to avoid his persecution. She has a twelve-year-old son, Jack, who is growing up without a father figure or peers. Ellen reveals to Tom that his baby son was rescued by monks in a small monastery in the same forest.
The action then moves to the monastery, and we are introduced to Phillip, its effective and devout leader. Phillip is happy to take in the child; he himself was raised in a monastery after his parents were killed.
Phillip learns that the Earl of Shiring (Aliena’s father) is plotting against the king, and he brings that knowledge to Waleran Bigod, one of the bishop’s men. Waleran eventually becomes bishop himself (more on this later, too), and it’s from him that Sir Percy Hamleigh, William’s father, learns of the Earl of Shiring’s plot. Percy and his wife haven’t gotten over Aliena’s refusal to marry William, so they are happy to use this knowledge to attack and depose the earl. In this way Percy gains the earldom.
Meanwhile, Tom and Ellen, along with their children, arrive at the priory Phillip leads. Phillip gives them a little food, but cannot afford to employ Tom, even though the priory’s cathedral is not in good shape. Ellen’s son, Jack, sets fire to the priory one night, so that Phillip will hire Tom to rebuild it.
The Pillars of the Earth got off to a good start. It is very readable and interesting. And very suspenseful—I was constantly on the edge of my seat, so much so that it was a stressful reading experience. Unfortunately, though, the book quickly became disturbing and creepy.
The reader spends a lot of time in the head of William Hamleigh, and he is a sadistic character with a propensity for rape and killing.
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To give a few examples of some things that are disturbing, but not quite as awful, Tom and Ellen first meet when he and his family have a brief encounter with Ellen while Tom’s wife Agnes is still alive. Tom is happily married to Agnes and loves her very much, but given Ellen’s beauty it is perhaps an understandable thing that he fantasizes about Ellen while married to Agnes. Except that Tom’s fantasies involve forcing Ellen.
Tom doesn’t rape Ellen, at least not in the part of the book I read. He just has this fantasy while still in a loving marriage to Agnes. He has it a couple of times, once immediately after the brief meeting with Ellen, and a couple of weeks later, it’s on his mind again.
Another creepy thing, within a day of Agnes’s death while Tom’s grief is still very fresh, Ellen finds the exhausted, starving Tom asleep and has sex with him in his sleep, while he is dreaming of a beautiful angel. Ellen has her own agenda and reasons for doing this, reasons that are only hinted at this early in the novel.
Similarly unsettling, Phillip is a good person but a bit naive. He wants to become the prior of the local priory because he knows he could do a lot of good there. Waleran Bigod, the Bishop of Kingsbridge’s man, asks Phillip to support him for the position of bishop, someday when the current bishop dies, in return for throwing his support to Phillip’s bid for the prior position.
Phillip agonizes over this; he’s not one to play politics and he takes his devotion to God and to Christian ideals very seriously. But the only other possible candidate for bishop is slothful and lethargic and Phillip naively believes that man would be a worse choice than Waleran. Phillip really wants to do good to at the priory so he says yes. A day later he learns that the bishop is already dead and Waleran kept it from him. Waleran has conned Phillip.
Also disturbing, Tom’s eldest son Alfred is a bully and when their group is nearly starving to death, Alfred takes more than his share of food, so that his younger sister, Martha, and Ellen’s son, Jack, can hardly have any. Ellen protests but Tom is an indulgent father and doesn’t see the harm in it, or in Alfred’s bullying.
Things only get worse from there.
Spoiler (all the trigger warnings): Show
This was where I cried uncle.
The book is about a thousand hardcover pages long. I read the equivalent of 357 hardcover pages, and I think that’s more than enough to give me a sense of it and what it’s like.
Yes, torture was common in the twelfth century. Probably rape was too. But does it need to be described at such length? It is rarely hinted at; much of the time the cruelty is presented almost lovingly. For example, when William rapes Aliena, we’re in William’s viewpoint as he’s committing the rape. The sadistic pleasure he takes in every bit of it is described in lingering, fulsome detail.
The book reminds me of the Game of Thrones TV show (I have not read the GoT novels) which I also had to quit because I just could not take it.
From what I remember of what I read around the time The Pillars of the Earth was published (1989), that kind of graphic violence was not so unusual in a saga. And I wonder whether, if I had read it back then, I would have found The Pillars of the Earth more tolerable because of my expectations of books at that time.
There are some likeable characters in The Pillars of the Earth whose fates I would like to know, and I liked the historical detail about life in the twelfth century, about cathedral building and about how monks structured their day and how a 12th century priory was run. All that stuff was great.
The plot is engaging–I wasn’t bored at all, and in a thousand-page book, that’s remarkable. But there was so much graphic, sadistic violence, and if I had to say what this novel’s central themes are, I would say they are treachery and cruelty. So yeah, no. Hard no.
This book was a huge bestseller in its day and I don’t understand why. Maybe someone can explain it to me in the comments?
DNF.
Sincerely,
Janine
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I don’t know how many times over the years I’ve debated trying this book but your content and trigger warnings are enough to tell me I made the correct decision in not reading it.
The movie version with Rufus Sewell was really good, but also hard to stomach in parts.
I couldn’t finish this one either. The writing seemed too simplistic for such a big story. I’d heard such good things about it was a major disappointment.
I tried. It was a long time ago, I didn’t even get to trigger warnings I think, because if plot is engaging, I usually don’t stop due to what you mentioned under the cut (, but I think I only managed two or three chapters . Not sure why. Thanks for the review.
Thank you! Now I can stop worrying that I missed a great book.
My mother DNFed this when it came out for pretty much the exact reason mentioned. I still remember her disgust years later. And she loves Ken Follett, but not this one. I pretty much haven’t picked it up for that reason. My mom and I don’t have taste that overlaps much when it comes to likes, but weirdly our dislikes our pretty similar.
I used to enjoy Ken Follet’s books, but also couldn’t finish this. Never understood why it was so popular.
@Jayne: Yup, I can tell you right now that it’s not your cuppa at all.
@Lin: It’s hard to see how so much story could be compressed into a movie, but even with a lot of cutting, I don’t think I could watch a movie of this.
@Jenreads: I didn’t mind the simplicity of the prose and of the storytelling but I agree it was an odd choice for a novel of such scope and one that has what would seem to be a complicated plot. From a technical standpoint, the simplicity interested me; I was curious to see how Follett would employ it. I can understand finding it unappealing, though. The characters certainly aren’t very complicated, and if they were, I think the book might be better.
@Barb in Maryland: Yes, it’s not for you. LOL. I think I had this feeling too, before I started it—that I would be missing out if I didn’t read it. Ha!
@Jill Q.: Your mother has good taste when it comes to her no-gos.
@Cristie: I wonder if I might like his other books. Are they very different?
Oh my God. Thank you for reading this and taking one for the team. Many, many years ago, one of my good friends in high school insisted that Pillars of the Earth was amazing and I should read it, and the details of medieval life were wonderful. I looked at the enormous book and was like… nah, I’d rather spend that time on a book I felt more enthusiasm for.
Years later, I tried to watch the Pillars of the Earth TV show and while I loved the character of Phillip, I sensed from how the story was going he was going to get really screwed, and since I was dealing with unemployment and other stressful stuff at the time, the last thing I wanted was stressful stuff in my entertainment. So I noped out early.
But yes. I think you have an excellent point when you say that this would have been easier to read back in the day, because that was the accepted style. Ultra-violent, ultra-sexed up historical epics were such a huge thing back in the ’70s and ’80s!
There was one book I read, Nicholas Guild’s The Assyrian, which had pretty extensive stomach-churning descriptions of how the Assyrians would torture their victims. It was horrifying (though, yes, unfortunately, historically accurate). But at least The Assyrian’s protagonist was a good, moral character, and the story was told 100% from his POV; there was no rape or any skeevy villain POV nonsense, which I think was one reason why I finished it. There WAS a lot of gross stuff in it that hasn’t aged well, and I doubt I would reread this book now; but it’s sad to think that this book, which at the time I thought was the ne plus ultra of violent, sexed-up torture porn hist fic, was actually one of the lesser offenders, especially compared to Pillars of the Earth.
Seriously. WTF.
Again, thanks again for trying to read this, and giving me a solid reason to not touch this book with a ten foot pole.
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@Joanne Renaud: Yeah, you didn’t miss much. Although my husband, who finished the book, said that:
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You are so right about the sagas of the 1970s and 1980s. Although recently I skimmed my favorite parts of another saga from around that time (published in 1979), Jefferey Archer’s Kane and Abel. I’ve only been reading parts but in the 25% I have revisited there is nothing repellant. The book is so much calmer. And yet it was a hugely popular saga at the height of the violent saga trend and is just as riveting.
(Archer seems to be a huckster; his wiki page is fascinating. He has profited from multiple scams, served as an MP for the Conservative Party in the UK, and is also a bestselling novelist and now a life peer, Baron of Weston-Super-Mare. Come to think of it, his life story would make a good saga.)
I read this years ago and your description of the violence brings back a sort of visceral sense of grossness. I think I did take it as sort of normal for that type of book at the time, though, and I found the book pretty compelling even though it was hella long.
My main issue with PotE was the focus in later parts on Jack Builder, who I found to be an annoying Marty-Stu-like character.
I think I mostly was able to stomach the violence in the Game of Thrones books, for some reason. Maybe it’s easier for me to read if it’s fantasy or set in the long ago? I know I quit Leon Uris’ Trinity because there was an elaborate description of a drawing and quartering on the first page (at least that’s how I remember it), and I could never really get over the fact that E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate opens with mobsters on a boat putting a rival’s feet in cement and everyone sitting around waiting for it to harden before they throw the guy overboard. (That last one creeps me out even typing about it, for all that it’s less blood-and-guts violent than any of the other examples that are coming to mind.)
@Jennie: I didn’t get far enough to read the parts about Jack as an adult. I liked him a lot as a kid.
I really struggled with Game of Thrones (the show). I’d put some of Joffrey’s actions and certainly what Ramsay did to Theon (and later in the show, to Sansa), as well as Stannis’s burning of his young daughter Shireen alive at the stake, up against any of what I’ve read in The Pillars of the Earth. I don’t see how it’s any better. TBH, I think the biggest reason that I kept watching it for as long as I did was that other people kept talking about how great it was.
Re Trinity and Billy Bathgate, thanks for the warning. I’ll avoid them like the plague now.
@Janine: I’m trying to think of the points in GoT that were most painful to me – maybe Theon’s torture by Ramsay? Shireen was awful but it was over in one scene, whereas the Theon/Ramsay torture played out over episodes. Maybe it was actually heightened because Theon himself had been a villain of sort – there was something about his degradation that felt particularly keen because you sort of had to break through resentment towards the character and feel for his suffering.
When I think “relentless suffering”, what actually comes to mind is the book I finished relatively recently – Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler. That was a bit hard for me to read.
I read this heavy, hardcover book over many days of a 100 degree heat wave and the only good to come out of reading this book is the decision to buy an iPad.
@Jan: I burst out laughing when I read your comment. LOL. I’m glad you got something out of reading it.
I read 80 pages of this book and by that time I was embarrassed that I had considered reading it. The clunky writing and simplistic historical errors were just the start (in early 12th century England, how likely is it that someone with an English name like Hamleigh would wield any serious power? The country had been aggressively colonised by the Norman french only about 60 years before. Bishops and their cathedrals were replaced as a political act, a vast network of castles was built to control the population, land was confiscated, the language demoted, the aristocracy effectively eliminated). But- What killed me off was the staggeringly offensive portrayal of women, either knife toting viragoes with plunging bosoms, painted whores or plain but worthy madonnas, and the dumb hero’s juvenile attractions were one dimensional at best. Having sex with someone you hardly know when your wife has died less than 6 hours before?? Can this have been written in the late 80s?? Terrible. Even the descriptions of masons and builders work was like something out of a primary school textbook. And I work on historic stonework for a living.