Re: Pillars of the Earth/World Without End
I loved anything Follet wrote and was stunned when I read Pillars when it first came out- it was as far from any spy story as you could get- and sensational. The movie would be too hard to make I thought.
The back story:
The Pillars of the Earth
In a time of civil war, famine and religious strife, there rises a magnificent Cathedral in Kingsbridge. Against this backdrop, lives entwine: Tom, the master builder, Aliena, the noblewoman, Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge, Jack, the artist in stone and Ellen, the woman from the forest who casts a curse. At once, this is a sensuous and enduring love story and an epic that shines with the fierce spirit of a passionate age.
Ken's View
This is my most popular book. It still sells about 100,000 copies a year in paperback in the US, it was number one in the UK and Italy and it was on the German best seller list for six years. It's overwhelmingly the book that readers talk to me about when I meet them in bookshops. It's becoming a cult.
When I started writing, back in the early Seventies, I found I had no vocabulary for describing buildings. I read a couple of books on architecture and developed an interest in cathedrals. I became a bit of a train spotter on the subject. I would go to a town, like Lincoln or Winchester, check into a hotel and spend a couple of days looking around the cathedral and learning about it. Before too long, it occurred to me to channel this enthusiasm into a novel.
When I started talking about the idea, some of my friends were quite shocked. They said, "you know, you've had a lot of success with these thrillers, are you sure you want to write about building a church?".
However, those of my friends who are writers saw immediately how the building of the church would be the spine of the story and the focus for the lives of all the characters. I knew it had to be a long book. It took at least thirty years to build a cathedral and most took longer because they would run out of money, or be attacked or invaded. So the story covers the entire lives of the main characters.
Writing Pillars of the Earth was exhausting. It is much more difficult to write one book of 400,000 words than three or four shorter books because you have to keep making up more and more stuff about the same people. Pillars of the Earth took me three years and three months and towards the end I was working Saturdays and Sundays because I thought I was never going to get it finished.
My publishers were a little nervous about such a very unlikely subject but paradoxically, it is my most popular book. It's also the book I'm most proud of. It recreates, quite vividly, the entire life of the village and the people who live there. You feel you know the place and the people as intimately as if you yourself were living there in the middle ages.
World Without End
The No. 1 New York Times best-seller.
On the day after Halloween, in the year 1327, four children slip away from the cathedral city of Kingsbridge. They are a thief, a bully, a boy genius and a girl who wants to be a doctor. In the forest they see two men killed.
As adults, their lives will be braided together by ambition, love, greed and revenge. They will see prosperity and famine, plague and war. One boy will travel the world but come home in the end; the other will be a powerful, corrupt nobleman. One girl will defy the might of the medieval church; the other will pursue an impossible love. And always they will live under the long shadow of the unexplained killing they witnessed on that fateful childhood day.
World Without End is the sequel to The Pillars of the Earth. However, it doesn
