Ken Follett, World Without End

World Without End is the sequel to Ken Follett's best-selling The Pillars of the Earth, originally published in 1989.  The sequel did not appear until 2007, and had been sitting on my shelf since then.  I read The Pillars of the Earth when I was in graduate school studying the Middle Ages, and recall it as being rather breathtaking in its scope and sweeping presentation of history, as well as in the manner in which it humanizes this history through likable characters.

I was therefore fairly surprised to find World Without End, to be a rather schlocky attempt.  The characters are, for the most part, cardboard cutouts, and some grow increasingly so as the hefty 1000-page novel moves on.  Still, the soap opera drama of the interrelations between the characters is compelling enough to keep a reader turning page after page (after page after page).  I was quite surprised to find myself both disliking the book and unable to put it down.

Set in fourteenth-century England, the novel's action centers on Merthin, great-grandson of Jack Builder, the central character in Pillars, and Caris, daughter of a wealthy wool merchant.  We track them from childhood into middle age, as they and the characters around them struggle against a repressive and close-minded church, evil lords, and ultimately, the Black Plague, which comes in waves that decimate the population of their city.

All the "good" characters, with whom we sympathize, are those able to see outside of the mindset of the Middle Ages in which they live.  Caris, running a hospital, intuits the process by which diseases spread.  Merthin, designing a new spire for the cathedral built by his ancestor, develops one radical innovation after another.  And both care not a whit for the church, especially in regard to the sexual mores it insists upon.

Similarly, all the "bad" characters, some of whom we despise, are those whose attitudes reflect the medieval setting of the novel.  There is one evil, conniving church leader after another, one rapacious lord after another.  This is a real problem for the novel, since there is no reason to think that everyone living in the Middle Ages, who thought as a medieval person would have, was also a terrible person.  It is a cheap way to play on our sympathies, by suggesting that we should like the characters who think like we do.  It would have been far more challenging for the author -- and for his readers -- to grapple with the feelings and thoughts of those who do not share (totally anachronistically) a modern outlook on disease, architecture and engineering, sex, sexuality (there are a few gay characters, and our modern-thinking "friends" in the novel are progressive thinkers on the subject who would clearly have voted against Prop 8!), and so on.  As is, the book requires very little of readers, and does not at any point really ask us to step outside ourselves, even while reading about the distant past.