beginning of ‘The pillars of the earth’ is quite a trial. Eco has stated that he
wanted to start off slowly and that he wanted the reader to be forced to do
some laborious reading before getting to the ‘good stuff’, just as the monks that
figure in his novel would have had to. Follett’s start is not laborious or
overwrought but frustrating, in that each new chapter presents us with
completely new characters and situations, where there is no seeming
correlation to anything that has gone before other than that we are in Britain in
the Middle Ages.
Needless to say that, in the end, all the different threads are indeed part of the
same bundle, and oh my, what a bundle it is! It is difficult to say which character
or which characters are the main characters, there are so many. The thing that
holds the entire narrative loosely together is the construction of the cathedral
of Kingsbridge, after one of the characters accidentally ‘helps’ the old cathedral
to be burnt down. As construction of such an enormous building goes in
medieval times, this cathedral takes literally ages to be completed. The story
begins and finishes with a hanging, and has the building of house-of-god at the
centre. Cathedrals are built by mortals, the story seems to imply, and will
outlive them all. Of course this symbolism of human death and eternity in stone
is present in the entire novel, though it must be noted that humans can also
play a part in the destruction of such eternal buildings.
With so many characters and with such a long time-span, it is an amazing thing
that Follett has succeeded in creating such engaging characters. There are
many individual characters and to get to know them better the perspective is
close to one character for a length of time before hopping to the next. This is
done is such a subtle manner that it seems as if there is an omniscient narrator
at work all the time, which is not really the case. His characters are vividly (and
sometimes flamboyantly) portrayed, and though none are completely good or
evil, you soon start to root for the better ones and start to hate the evil-doers.
There is one minor quibble that I have with this novel, and this occurs in the
latter part of the book. Since it concentrates so heavily on the construction of a
cathedral and thus on a physical spot (Kingsbridge and its surroundings) in
which the characters move, the end seems somewhat alien. The action is
moved to France and then Spain for quite a long stretch of time, whilst the plot
is not really advanced. Of course, the cathedral-builders needed information on
the newest building techniques that had been developed in France, but I felt
the entire narrative lost in power and balance when the story of the
construction of Kingsbridge cathedral took me to the continent.
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