World Without End by Ken Follett

read by John Lee

It’s two centuries after the building of Kingsbridge Cathedral, and while many things have stayed the same—for example, the balance of power between the hidebound clergy and the rapacious nobility is constantly being pushed at by both sides, pretty much always to the detriment of everyone else—change is on the way. The Hundred Years’ War has begun, and the Black Death is on the horizon. This won’t just mean the death of 60% of the population, but also the beginning of the end of the feudal system. New ideas about medicine and architecture are beginning to develop, among other things, and they’ll change the world, too.

In World Without End we see all of this through the eyes of four main characters: Caris, the daughter of a wool merchant; Merthin and Ralph, two very different sons of an impoverished knight; and Gwenda, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well landless laborer. As the book begins, they’re all children. Gwenda is being made to steal a nobleman’s purse at a crowded church service—which immediately leads to a plot twist I don’t want to spoil. In fact the entire book is essentially a big ball of easily-spoiled twisty-turny plotty-wotty stuff. In fact the plot thickens at such a pace that it’s as dense as a neutron star long before you get to the middle of the book's thousand or so pages (a.k.a. 45+  hours of audiobook).

Don’t let the size of the thing put you off, though. I’m long past the age when I was a size queen about books (ah, to be young and have time for a book-a-day habit—during the summer, at least), but I was engaged all the way through. Yes, Follett is putting characters with relatively modern mind-sets into a historical setting—but only relatively modern, and there’s a reason for it. He’s writing about a time when the world was changing pretty rapidly, after all. And he also includes plenty of characters with thoroughly contemporary points of view, including two of the four POV characters, only one of whom is a villain.

By having his main characters start off as children who don’t understand everything, Follett eases the reader into a world that isn’t fully understood. And throughout the book he explains all sorts of things we may not be familiar with, without ever making the reader feel talked down to; it just seems very natural that a given character wouldn’t understand a given situation or a technology fully, and you learn about it along with them. There are several times when some characters seem painfully and even unrealistically naive, but that's my only quibble with a really grand work of historical fiction.

For fans of the first book in this trilogy, Pillars of the Earth, this is a must-read. But you needn't have read the first book to enjoy this one thoroughly; it's written to stand alone. Strongly recommend.