"The Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett

 

A vast epic of a historical novel told by a superb storyteller.

It is set in the days of the Anarchy, when King Stephen and Empress Maud battled for the English throne, a time of rebellions leading to a full-blown civil war, the entire period lasting for seventeen years during which time parts of England were controlled, an terrorised, by the local warlord. Against this background is set the story of Prior Philip who wants to improve his monastery and a builder who wants to work on a cathedral. The baddies include the local bishop and a wannabe earl; the goodies, beside the prior and the builder include the daughter of the earl who is defeated, usurped and killed, and the talented bastard son of a witch and a hanged jongleur. 

There's plenty of action to keep the reader turning the more than a thousand pages. Conflict rules, whether it be a disputed election of a prior, a mob of outlaws attacking a town, an army of soldiers destroying a castle, rape, murder, cursing witches, plenty of sex ... this is a story that has everything. And at this length, there is even time to develop the characters. True, most of them have little nuance. William the bad earl and Waleran the bad bishop are villains through and through with  no redeeming features whatsoever: they are figures straight from mystery plays or melodramas. But the goodies have a degree of complexity which allows the author to keep posing problems for them which they solve but not entirely so that the solutions can return to haunt them. In the end, this reader hoped and hoped that, despite moments or peril and jeopardy, despite impossible odds, his favourites would survive and prosper till the end. Read on, read on!

If you want a page-turner, you cannot fault this novel. It begins with the line: "The small boys came early to the hanging." which is an incredible hook. After that, a paragraph setting the scene is perfectly in order. The few pages of this Prologue ground the reader thoroughly in the setting but are also full of action so it becomes impossible not to read on.

After this there is plenty to get your teeth into. There's plenty of description telling me more about this period, and cathedral building, than I have learned in many standard history books. But the key to the readability is that you are never more than a few pages away from yet another confrontation. The Battle of Lincoln. The murder of Thomas a Beckett. The collapse of a cathedral. It might be a thousand pages plus, but the pace never flags.

And each of these set pieces, from sex to battle, from court room scene to cathedral killing, is perfectly written. 

A whirlwind of a read.

Selected quotes:

• "He seemed fond of Philip but wary of him, like a father whose son has been away to war and has come home with a sword in hius belt and a slightly dangerous look in his eye." (1.4.1)
• "Pray for miracles, but plant cabbages." (3.12.1)
• "The ducks swallow the worms, and the foxes kill the ducks, and the men shoot the foxes, and the devil hunts the men." (5.16.1)

April 2026; 1080 pages

First published by Macmillan in 1989

My paperback edition was issued by Pan in 2023

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"1541: The Cataclysm" by Robert William Jones

This book is the first in the Micklegate series. It is an entertainingly irreverent romp blend of at least three genres: historical, thriller and fantasy. The tone is set right from the start with an execution described by a narrator with a very dark sense of humour. 

'Lord' Silas, a village idiot, Robert, Lord Mayor of York, two monks chucked out of the monasteries following the Dissolution, washerwomen ex-nun Elspeth and her crippled friend Wynnfrith, farmer Richard Shakespeare (grandfather of the playwright), Edward Fawkes (father of Guy) and assorted others form an impromptu group (the Agents of the Word) led by a talking mouse with a secret (not just that he talks) and an attitude problem. Their purpose is to save Tudor England from a Cataclysm. 

There were moments when the pacing was spot on (the group coheres at exactly the 33% mark, there is a revelation worthy of W S Gilbert as the 50% mark) but there were other moments when the plot seemed to suddenly speed up. Some elements of the quest such as the discovery of the books and the recovery of Abigail seemed rather too easy. I wasn't sure how the Lizzie sub-plot fitted in but I appreciated that not everyone lived happily ever after. Nor am I sure that I fully understood all the clues in the convoluted plot but it was certainly an ingenious climax. There was even a twist in the mouse's tale. 

Selected quotes:

• "Annie was a middle-aged horse with the strength, dedication and attitude of a foal." (Ch 1)
• "Bacteria in all its glorious forms was here and having an all-night party, but simultaneously, completely absent in the imagination of the sixteenth-century public." (Ch 2)
• "He was a crap juggler spending most of the morning chasing his balls around the market, if you’ll forgive the expression." (Ch 5) 
• "We will win because we are good" (Ch 15) A character who understands the rules of fiction!
• "She’d find a better catch in the river!" (Ch 16)
•  "The King has planted a new Bishop there. More a pawn than a Bishop. " (Ch 17)
• "I didn't have an opinion about this. Strange, you think. Is the mouse unwell?" (Ch 18)
• "'What an unfortunate mismatch of miscreants and misfits!’ He annoyingly alliterated." (Ch 23)

An entertaining slice of horrible history with lots of humour. June 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Lazarus Rising" by Neil Thomson

 This novel is a cross between The Bourne Identity and the story of the Tichbourne Claimant. It is set during and after the Napoleonic Wars. A man arrives in the Kentish village of Stelling Minnis. He knows no more about his past, or his identity, than that he was pulled alive from a pile of corpses on the battlefield of Waterloo. At the same time the long-lost son of the Lord of the Manor returns to the village to claim his inheritance. But is he who he says he is? And who is the mysterious stranger? The story jumps backwards and forwards in time before racing to the final confrontation.

It is a great premise for a story and the pacing of the tale was perfect with major turning-points placed almost precisely at the 25%, 50% and 75% marks. It's a fairly short book at 180 pages, quick and easy to read. There's plenty of action and the story never flags. There is little moral ambiguity although the main character feels that he is a curse on others which allows the reader to wonder whether the ending will be happy or tragic. 

If you enjoy fast-paced straightforward thrillers, this is the book for you.

Selected quotes:

• "The sun crept up the sky the way ivy grows up a wall, slowly." (first line)
• "The river could mean salvation or death as he could not actually remember if he could swim." (Ch 19)
• "In the end, a person is their memories." (Ch 23)

September 2021

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"House of Thieves" by Charles Belfoure

 New York, 1886. A society architect is blackmailed into helping a gangster plan daring raids on banks and society mansions. The architect's entire family, one by one, discover the thrills of illicit activity.

The author has clearly done a lot of research about New York of that period. Some paragraphs, for example when describing the menus of a society dinner, sound as if he has transcribed his research notes. 

From this situation, the plot development is entirely cliched and predictable. The characters are predictably two-dimensional. Complex human emotions are described in a few definitive sentences (we are told, repeatedly, that George's gambling problem is a sickness). The amorality of the story is immense: bit parts are killed off in a few sentences and, although the architect is said to suffer remorse and horror about the murders he witnesses, the reader doesn't feel that. The entire story is plot driven.

And the plot is predictable, repetitive and boring. There's a heist. There's another heist. And then another. There's an informer. The architect's brother is a policeman.  There is gambling, drinking, prostitution, pick-pocketing ... There are society balls (and, of course, rigid moral codes: these are regarded as straight-jackets against which the crime spree seems like entrepreneurial free enterprise). This is a story that has been written many times before. 

Not my sort of tale.

July 2021; 413 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Ex-Libris" by Ross King

Isaac Inchbold, a book-seller, becomes involved in the hunt for a rare manuscript in the early days of the reign of Charles II. His story is interwoven with that of Emilia, maid-in-waiting to Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia in the 1620s who, with Sir Ambrose Pennington and a Czech librarian, flees with the manuscript from Prague to London, pursued by three mysterious men.

This is a superbly researched historical thriller whose huge amounts of detail add much-needed verisimilitude to a plot that ranges from cryptography to Rosicrucianism to Sir Walter Ralegh's search for El Dorado. Although the Isaac Inchbold plot is more or less credible, with Isaac wandering around London and South East England in search of clues to this manuscript, the 1620s plot in which three characters are pursued by three extraordinarily sinister characters who never quite catch up with them is very repetitive and seems designed principally for the regular cliff-hangers that it produces. The protagonist asks, quite late on in the book, "How could a manuscript of fourteen pages – a few scraps of goatskin scribbled with a mixture of lampblack and vegetable gum – possibly be valuable enough for someone to kill for?" (3.2) and it is a question which more or less gets answered (before a cataclysmic ending worthy of Poe) but it is the fact that the pursuers are both so sinister yet repeatedly fail that I found far-fetched. That and the shipwreck in which all three protagonists and all three mysterious antagonists survive but almost no other 'bit part' despite the fact that the bit parts were all experienced sailors: that forfeited credibility.

Nevertheless, the author has a wonderful gift for description. The main character is memorably described as "a small man with dark garb and the morose, worried eyes of a puffin." (3.4) Other original descriptions, which are utterly of their period, include:

• "I closed my eyes, and sleep, with its heavy die, pressed its seal across their lids." (1.4)
• "The coach forded the thin stream, its wheels tossing curtains of water to either side." (1.7)
• "after much truffling in one of the cupboards, presented me with a fat volume," (2.13)
• "The walls of the corridor were lined with busts and marble figures like the ones in the garden of Arundel House, their ancient noses and lips obliterated like those of syphilitics." (3.5)
• "He was on his haunches beside the cabinet, grunting and red-faced like someone at his close-stool." (3.5)

Other wonderful moments during the book: included:

• "It is easier to find a labyrinth, writes Comenius, than a guiding path. Yet every labyrinth is a circle that begins where it ends, as Boethius tells us, and ends where it begins." (1.1)
• "these books were doomed. This wasn’t a library so much as a charnel-house." (1.3)
• "Quite amazing how determined kings and emperors have been to destroy books. But civilisation is built on such desecrations, is it not? Justinian the Great burned all of the Greek scrolls in Constantinople after he codified the Roman law and drove the Ostrogoths from Italy. And Shih Huang Ti, the first Emperor of China, the man who unified the five kingdoms and built the Great Wall, decreed that every book written before he was born should be destroyed." (1.3)
• "fifty years ago the great Isaac Casaubon had demonstrated how the entire Corpus hermeticum – this supposed fountainhead of the world’s most ancient magic and wisdom – was nothing more than a fraud, the invention of a handful of Greek scholars living in Alexandria at some time in the century after Christ." (1.7)
• "hundreds of documents inscribed in bizarre codes composed of astrological signs and other chicken-scratchings" (2.2)
• "Trust, after all, is the mother of deceit." (2.9)
• "where he urged me to sample a new beverage called ‘rumbullion’, or ‘rum’ for short. It was a hellish fluid that seemed to scald the gullet and cloud the brain." (2.11)
• "I knew, of course, that greed was essential to a lawyer’s craft," (3.4)
• "Learning was no longer being used for the improvement of the world: it had become instead the handmaid of prejudice and orthodoxy, and prejudice and orthodoxy the handmaids of slaughter." (Epilogue)

Beautifully written but a disappointing plot.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Ross King is a brilliant historian of art who has written, among other books:

• Brunelleschi's Dome
• Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
• Leonardo and the Last Supper
• The Judgement of Paris