Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth

Kitty Liu
Apr 28, 2021
5 min read

It’s a historical novel set in 12th century England, in it they build a cathedral. My annual dose of medieval monastery content.

I had the good fortune to experience it as a 40-hour audiobook; Goodreads tells me that the print version is 976 pages. I’ve spent so much time on it that I have to write something.

The book follows a host of characters over a period of fifty years, starting with the succession crisis of Henry I and ending with the martyrdom of Thomas Beckett. The main thing in English history during this interval is the Anarchy, a civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maude (/Matilda), that sets up a backdrop of politico-economic instability for the plot to take place. The plot centres on one fictional village of Kingsbridge (placed in non-fictional Wiltshire), where a cathedral is built over the course of the book, a stunning pioneer of Gothic architecture in Britain. This links together the main characters: the prior of the monastery at Kingsbridge, who commissions the cathedral; generations of builders who work on it; dispossessed heirs to an earldom nearby; their political adversaries; and real historical figures like King Stephen, Henry of Winchester, and Thomas Beckett.

The church-building stuff is very cool. A lot of detail into the geometry and physics involved in their design, for both the Romanesque style and the later Gothic. ‘The church-building stuff’ is what originally drew me to the book, granted that I didn’t have much prior knowledge of medieval architecture at the outset. This book is not to cathedrals what Moby Dick was to whales, but it does have fairly substantial descriptions and meditations on designs of churches and why they work. Big descriptive sections can get quite wordy and difficult to visualise, but it’s not hard to get the gist. Follett himself professes to be knowledgeable about medieval cathedrals and their architecture, and ‘the church-building stuff’ does not disappoint.

The book is very well plotted. All the political intrigue and counter-intrigue chugs along at a self-assured pace: problem, solution, consequent new problem - be it falling victim to political machinations or having one’s lover run away or not having money to build a cathedral. There is genuine ingenuity in the characters’ solutions, no deus ex machina in sight.

Most of the characters are very consistent. Which is a good thing because plausibility and believability etc, and it also helps you keep track of them all. But it’s also a problem because as the story goes on their responses get very predictable and a little bit boring. All the characters get more tired and bitter towards the end, but it doesn’t make a difference to plot or relationships. A few antagonists are redeemed, but these are more minor characters. A more experienced connoisseur of popular fiction would probably diagnose the book as having ‘no character progression’. I think it’s perfectly possible to tell a good story without character progression, and I’d argue our modern obsession with progress has seeped into what we demand of fictional people in our media, but in a thousand-page book, no character development does make for boredom.

For example, one of the main characters’ central defining feature is that he’s an incel. Everything he does is essentially motivated by spite at having been spurned by this one woman. It’s very repetitive and genuinely distasteful. It is made clear that nobody likes him, and the things he does are bad, but the portrayal is made no less graceless or abrasive.

Related to the incel problem is the amount of gratuitous violence and sex that goes on in this book. So. Unnecessary. A lot of gore, some animal cruelty, too much of a male-fantasy quality in the sex scenes, waayyy to much rape. What feels like a third of the book is just sexualising this one woman, from the start when she is a teenager to the end where she has grandchildren. Virtually every scene she is in has to feature some description of her body, ideally the breasts. Like, it’s okay Ken, we get that her lover thinks she’s hot and other men want to sexually abuse her, we get it, please stop.

With all this, the book falls into an uncanny valley, of not being publishable now (or at least of getting heavily criticised for gratuitous grossness), but not having been published long enough ago that we can attribute it The Author’s Times and move on. While it has been thirty years since the book’s publication, it’s nowhere near long ago enough that I don’t feel uncomfortable.

One could argue that Follett is just trying to emulate the violence of the 12th century, but there are infinitely more tasteful and meaningful ways to do that. It’s also blatantly implausible because of the book’s very modern pace, tone and themes.

The book is ostensibly about cathedral-building, but it is more committed to themes of peace over violence, ending the arbitrary prerogatives of the nobility, and the emergence of mercantilism and streamlining the means of production. They give the book a distinctly modern twang. Since the book has some very clever characters, their propensity towards democracy, capitalism and automation is not altogetherly implausible. But it does feel quite unnecessary for them to not only be clever when utilising medieval resources, but to also be historically precocious by inventing the things that would underpin society in 700 years’ time.

Pillars of the Earth is really a modern story set in the 12th century, it’s not of the 12th century. Compare The Name of the Rose, where Eco purposefully emulates the tone, pacing, diction and thematic preoccupations of a 14th century monastery. Compare Wolf Hall, where Mantel interweaves details of clothing, songs, mannerisms, and personages to create an immersive 16th century court. It’s not necessarily Follett’s shortcoming for not creating a narrative that is as deeply grounded in the time period - it would compromise pace, for a start - but I do prefer that other kind, the tonally immersive kind of historical fiction, where hindsight does not sneak up in the narrator’s voice and give the characters a pat on the back.

The book’s prose is straightforward and has no artifice, in a way that signals contemporary genre fiction. (Before this, Follett was a thriller writer.) Occasionally, a word like lugubriously jumps out at you, as if to reassure you of the author’s literacy. It’s also funny, the way he throws in conceivably period-appropriate anatomical terms like pr-ck and c—t, apparent attempts at a taste of Ye Olde. Once you are familiar with all the characters, the book is quite low-effort to read. Since the characters’ responses become so predictable, you can get along fine by only half paying attention. Overall, the prose is serviceable, but doesn’t bring joy. But then, in the past year my reading has consisted mainly of David Foster Wallace, Ursula Le Guin, Nabokov and Melville - now Pillars of the Earth: it feels like living on a diet of deconstructed gourmet quiche and compote cheesecakes with their tops on fire, and then cracking open a Wasabi ready-meal.