The Book: World Without End, by Ken Follett

The Story: Not entirely sure where to start with this one.  This is the companion to Pillars of the Earth, which was another giant of a book.  Really the similarities end at the fact that they take place in the same town, Kingsbridge.  There were a few references to the characters from the first book, but I think that it was just to appease readers, they really had no relevance to the story.

In this one, we’re looking at England in the 1300’s.  The books starts with a scene featuring four kids: Merthin, his younger brother Ralph, Caris, and Gwenda.  They witness/are involved in the murder of two of the king’s men who were after this knight, Thomas.  Thomas is taken to the hospital at the monastery and he becomes a monk.  This moment becomes kind of a diving off point in the lives of these five characters, and their stories are what make up this mammoth of a book.

This is a big book. Typing up a summary is proving difficult because so much happened.  Mostly we’re looking at knights, and earls, and murder and deceit.  There’s also thieving monks, crazy ailment cures, people being sold, and a lot of fights.  There are building projects and a new way to dye cloth, and two witch trials.  There are three hospitals, lots of infections, and thousands of plague related deaths.  Then there is the sex.  Gay knight sex, steamy lesbian nun sex, several rapes, sex in the cathedral, sex in the woods, sex in public and more boob fondling than I can even record here.  All this sex leads to kids.  Bastard kids, kids raised by the wrong dads, all kinds of good stuff.

What I Thought: I like a character driven book.  There’s nothing better, for me, than a well written character.  For that, I loved this book. I felt like the main characters were fleshed out beautifully and by the end of the book, it was hard for me to remember that they were not real people.  I especially loved Caris and I found myself fighting for her in my head.  That internal struggle that she had throughout most of the book was written so perfectly and it made it easy to empathize with her.

In the same way, the “bad guys” were written in such a way that I could feel my blood pressure rise during parts about them.  Between Ralph and Godwyn, I could literally feel my anger spiking.  That really is nothing but good writing. Overall, I felt like the “bad guys” were kind of flat and didn’t really seem to change, but somehow it worked.

That being said, this book could have been about 500 pages shorter and still been really good.  The “oh, the plague is gone. Nope, it’s back. And gone again. One more case. Make that a hundred. Gone for good….” on and on and on made me want to chuck the book out the window.  The same with the conflicts with Godwyn, the prior.  I understood that he was a horrible man with bad intentions after the fifth example.  I don’t need ten more examples.  For me, parts of this felt like Ken Follett just wanted to write another long book.  And that his editor let him.

The sex was totally gratuitous, and again, about a fifth of it could have been left out and the reader could have gotten a clear picture of what was going on.  Merthin and Caris are lovers.  Look at them have sex in the woods. And in the church. And in the house. And in the…. ok. Got it. You know?

And this is all strange coming from me. I love a giant book.  My short list of favorite books are almost all books that hover around 1000 pages.  But I don’t like length just for the sake of length.  This was repetitious and tedious at parts. I just wanted to take my red pen to this book and save future readers some trouble.

Conclusion: If you have a lot of time on your hands, by all means read this.  The characters and the setting are really great.  But brace yourself for a lot of tedious fight scenes and over-the-top sex scenes.

In addition, I can’t wait to see what search terms get people to my blog after this entry. “Steamy Lesbian Nun Sex”. You can get it all here at Lovely Little Shelf! Ha.