The Pillars of the Earth

Did anyone else spot Tom Builder's mistake? He rose at dawn and set out two stakes in the direction of the rising sun and used these as the axis of his new cathedral, believing that they pointed due east, as a church should be oriented. Sorry Tom, the sun rises in a different place every morning, and in Kingsbridge's northern latitudes it is never due east. Otherwise a wonderful book and I cant wait for the sequel.

With so many reviews and 90% of them are 4 or more 5 stars, what else can be said? This is indeed storytelling at its best. I am not sure and I don't care if it is a literary masterpiece or if it will ever be a classic, but it is very entertaining and revealing.

I just have a few comments about the book's structure.

***PLEASE BE AWARE. THERE ARE SPOILERS BELOW***

In my opinion, the first act is the book's biggest strength. Not only most of the action is here, but the rhythm of the writing is amazing. Every scene has a built-in suspense (Tom and his family in the forest, the son's birth and Agnes's death, the second family coming in, Tom in the city and the killing of the pig thief, William taking over the Earl's castle, Aliena in the city looking for money and his father, Aliena ascent, William in the battle and, finally, William's attack on Kingsbridge and Tom Builder's death). It is one of the unusual cases when there is no shortage of description with fast paced action. It is not easy to achieve that.

The second act goes more or less from Tom's death and Jack travel to Spain. The writing became less descriptive. As an example, the number of pages dedicated to William's second attempt to attack Kingsbridge is way less compared to the previous attempt.

The conclusion is from Aliena's trip to the continent until the end. I expected Jack's trip and Aliena's chase to take longer. The suspense became rarer and the story more predictable. I soon realized that I was just at the wrap-up stage.

Nevertheless, I totally enjoyed this book. I wish that the second and third acts were as powerful as the first one and that's why I am giving 4 stars. It could have been 4 1/2 stars if that was possible. Eventually I will try "World Without End" (even with its mix reviews).

I usually read non-fiction, but this book has changed that. I loved this book and couldn't wait to get back to reading it when I had to put it down.

I picked this up on a friend's recommendation, and read it over the space of several days. I'll not try to summarise the plot, because that would be well-nigh impossible, with so many twists and turns. I sometimes have difficulty with much shorter books in remembering just who everyone is supposed to be, but there's no such problem here. The characters are strongly delineated, very memorable, and spread across a wide spectrum of society at that time. A period in which England was in a state of civil war, and your future could depend upon which side you supported.

It's against this background, and over the space of several decades, that a man of God tries to build a cathedral as a monument to him, but the more he tries the more he is frustrated, until he almost gives up. If this story has a moral it is that "God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform". If you can concentrate on one subject for some time, do not need to have basic building terms explained to you, and can use a dictionary to find the definition of the occasional unfamiliar word then this book should keep you enthralled.

I lived in England for two years and spent nearly every weekend touring cathedrals and attending evensong services in ancient gothic churches, so this book appealed to me on several levels. Obviously there's the history, which was really well researched. Then there was the story.

Ok. So. The story. It's an epic, in the tradition of Roots or something like that, which follows people for a lifetime. We watch the characters grow up, grow old, and their story mirrors that of the development of the cathedral in Kingsbridge, a fictional English town (yes, there's a real Kingsbridge near Cornwall, but that wasn't where this one was set - it was meant to be fairly close to Winchester). It was also interesting to see how the period known as The Anarchy affected ordinary people (it's one thing to read about the political intrigue of the time - quite another to think about how average people would have been affected by all that intrigue).

I thought it was interesting that all of the king's names stayed the same, but he changed the name of Matilda (the real woman who was a leader of one side of the civil war) to Maud. I wonder why the change?

The book is nearly 1000 pages. This was a challenge for me because I wanted to read the story quickly so that I didn't drag it out over weeks and weeks and then forget what had happened in the beginning (I read it in under a week, and as it was the early battles kind of blurred together). The problem with reading it so quickly, though, is that every night I was having bizarre dreams where I was a knight setting fire to random towns and riding my horse around cathedrals. I was completely obsessed with it for the week I read it. I think that's the way you've got to do it, though. Otherwise I think it would take forever to slog through.

And yeah, there were definitely pages that I skimmed over, deeming them filled with needless bits of pointless information. I would have liked to see some more editing.

All in all, though, it's a great book and I can see why you-know-who recommended it.