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Message: [QUOTE="Whining Civvy, post: 10411824, member: 109389"] This book proclaims itself the prequel to Mr Follett's [I]Pillars of the Earth [/I]trilogy and has a plot and characters so indistinguishable from the others that it may as well have not been written at all. We have the lowly peasant with a surprising talent for building things, the woman struggling to hold her own against powerful patriarchal social systems, the ambitious and ruthless Churchman, the grotesquely abusive husband, the good priest who wants to expand his holdings etc etc etc, all set in motion against a backdrop of an ancient and violent historical era. The author pumped this out during lockdown in 2020 and I can only assume that he reached for the same self-written [I]how to knock out a historical novel[/I] template used for the previous three as, honestly, the deja vu is overpowering. Instead of, God forbid, buying this, just reread any of the three on your bookshelf and save yourself a few quid, you'll have exactly the same experience without the having to quizzically wonder precisely why you paid for this about quarter of the way in. The story is unoriginal, the ending is incredibly lazy, with natural causes solving half of the problems and the king rolling up to royally wave away the rest ("That many pages already? Time to wrap this up, I think"). Uppences are comed and happilies are ever aftered. I did particularly enjoy how the peasant is packed off to become a Lord in France with his always-a-noble wife, I'm sure that would have gone down spectacularly in an era in which women were used as methods of creating and maintaining alliances between aristocratic houses. "Penelope, darling, what a delightful surprise, who is this you've brought with you?" "Hello mother (mwah mwah), this is Wayne, my new husband. He's an awfully good builder, you know." Oh to be a fly on the wall. If Ken Follett was half as good an author as people make him out to be then he'd have included that as a postscript, watching the presumptuous pleb being flogged to death whilst the girl is packed off to a nunnery would be a far more satisfying ending than the one we're given. Apparently research about the era was done (allegedly) although you wouldn't guess it. The social norms and behaviour of nobles are basically the same in both this book and Pillars of the Earth, despite that teeny tiny minor detail called the Norman Invasion taking place between them. There is, obviously, a very limited amount of information available to us regarding the tail end of the dark ages, and Follett (I'm dropping the Mr now, stuff him) does confess to taking liberties with the expert research he was provided with, and by 'liberties' I assume he meant 'ignored it because who the hell is going to know any different'. He also tosses in a little of what a far better man than I would have described as blatant poofery and one or two little touches of sisters are doing it for themselves, because this is the 21st Century and all the cool kids are doing it, or something. Anyway, I'm done. It's repetitive bolleaux, it's been done three times already and he's just taking the piss now, don't buy it. This wine is excellent, by the way. [/QUOTE]

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