World Without End | Easily As Good As Pillars

World Without End | A Good Fun Read

World Without End

	World Without End Dutton, 2007 average customer review:based on 395 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Easily As Good As Pillars

I was thrilled to find that there was a sequel to one of my favorite books - The Pillars of the Earth - but I wondered if it would be possible for Follett to produce another book with the same epic scale. Thankfully, he was.

Fair warning though - if you were not satisfied with how many times the "good" characters of Pillars were brought down, you will especially hate World. To me, it seemed that there were even more times when I just wanted to scream in frustration and remorse for the main characters, and there just was never enough retribution against the "bad" characters to make things seemed evened out by the end. Of course, this is part of the realism of the book that makes it all the better.

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A Good Fun Read

If you are looking for a good book to take on a trip, WWE and Pillars of the Earth, are good choices. Neither book is true historical fiction, the language is not necessarily true to the times, and sometimes the books just kind of drift along (especially WWE), but both fit squarely in the "good read, not memorable" category & I recommend them to everyone. Check them out from your library if you don't want to commit to a purchase.

Deja Vu

I recently finished Pillars of the Earth and immediately went out for this book. Had I not read POTE before this book would have been excellent. However, it clearly felt like a rehash. Most of the characters, as others have noted, felt like "lite" versions of characters from POTE. The only one that broke the mold was Gwenda.

One thing that was extraordinarily frustrating was the convenient ups and downs. The second any of the major protagonists had a good thing happen to them, there was the church or nobility to (sometimes literally) trample on them. And the reverse is true of the villains: they always get what they want without question and inflict misery upon their subjects. It got to the point where I was able to predict exactly what was going to happen the second the initial discovery occurred.

A character finds his freedom. Turn the page, and the character is being led back to his village with a rope around his neck. A villain is sentenced to death. Turn the page, and he's being pardoned and rewarded. A protagonist is going to get married to the man of her dreams. Turn the page, and she's being indicted for witchcraft and forced to become a nun. On one hand, conflict is an inescapable part of life. However, at the same time, you take a step back and realize you've got 600 more pages of the righteous getting stepped on and the villainous getting rewarded.

Also, just like Pillars of the Earth, each villain's end is never satisfying considering the decades of evil they've wrought upon the good people. Imagine if Adolf Hitler had survived WWII. After all that destruction - the holocaust, the war crimes, the devastation of Europe - would anyone be satisfied just seeing him hanged? No pain. No suffering. 1 second fine, the next, he's dead. With a villain like that, I want to see him suffer slowly, cognizant that he's been defeated and broken by those he felt were inferior.

That's how I felt about the villains here and in POTE. Their ends were too quick and clean. They met their end still thinking they were right, having never learned their lesson.

Above all, this book made me despise the Church. It really shows how gullible people can be led to believe anything. I'm not talking necessarily about faith in God, but in the constant theme throughout the book of clergymen using "God's will" for their own advancement. Every time the monks ran away from the plague and left the town to fend for themselves, they somehow managed to convince people that they were not blatant cowards. Every time a character developed a new medicinal treatment, the clergy would resort to ill-begotten traditional methods (Goat's dung? On an open wound?).

It really showed the Church for what it is: a man-made creation devised in God's name but destined to serve man's ambition.

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