Wow! Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth runs 972 pages, and not once did I think it was too long. The man is a story-teller. Something called The Third Twin—cool title IMHO—is already on my shelf of un-reads.
Miss Picky only showed up a few times and her complaints didn't hold up too well, but here they are:
1) I questioned Follett's use of the f-word because I'd heard it came about during the Victorian era. I was wrong. The dictionary I consulted said it had been in use prior to the 15th century and was always regarded as vulgar. Follett has it being used by a low-life, its use and the character completely in line with what the dictionary said.
2) In an absolutely wonderful play called On the Verge, written by Eric Overmeyer—a name probably familiar to fans of the TV series Homicide—one character asks another why evil exists. "To thicken the plot" is the response. Many things in the play are then labeled as plot-thickeners, even Richard Nixon. I'll add to the purpose of evil by saying that in addition to thickening the plot, it also provides interest. And what does all this have to do with Pillars? On page 817 we learn that William, the lowest of the lowlifes, is building a church and dedicating it "to the memory of his vicious, half-mad mother." I read those words and realized I would have liked to have seen more of her. Even in a book already close to one thousand pages! She and her son, William, were plot-thickeners of the highest caliber possible.
3) Related to the above, an English major might quibble that the characters were a tad too two-dimensional. But what the heck? It happens with melodrama—the term used descriptively not derogatorily—when an author has a huge canvas and lots and lots of people. BTW, contrasting to a complaint I've had about other large-scope stories, never once did I have trouble keeping Follett's characters straight. I really find him to be a remarkable writer.
I'll mention one other thing I noticed because its very happening bothered me and I'm still not sure why. Fairly early in the story William, mentioned above, commits a horrible and graphically presented rape. I read it, thinking "yuck, how awful" all the while I was reading. Several pages later William and his friends begin a game called "Stone the Cat" where they trap a cat in a room and … I'll stop there. And, in fact, that's where in the scene I stopped reading and skipped a descriptive paragraph or two. Then it started bothering me that the rape of a sympathetic character, a likable young lady, I could read but a scene where a cat is tortured I couldn't. What does that say about me? Beyond that, what does it say about us as a society? Are we so used to mistreatment of people that it's no longer even off-putting? Were the aliens in some science fiction movie—the title of which I can't remember—better than us because their reaction to Gillian's Island was "Oh, those poor people"? Granted, an extreme example but I'm just mulling.
Finally, as with any book I enjoy, "way leads on to way," and now I'm going to have to re-watch the movies Beckett and The Lion in Winter and reread T. S. Elliott's Murder in the Cathedral for other "takes" on the Henry II and Becket conflict. The lists of to-be-watched and to-be-read just keep growing.
