The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (1989)

Speaking of long historical novels, this one is so thick I may use it as a step stool. Warning: This one is very hard to read in bed.

The setting is medieval England in the 12th century, when the country was often involved in civil war and the king and the church were vying for dominance. The plot centers around the people and strife involved in the decades-long building of a vast Gothic cathedral.

Although The Pillars of the Earth is marketed as a work of historical fiction, it reads more like a fantasy novel with a mock-medieval setting, in the style of Robert Jordan or George R.R. Martin. It features an action-adventure plot with a set of stock characters, as is typical of the fantasy genre. While the background political strife is based on recorded history, the primary plot is entirely fictitious and so melodramatic and stereotypical as to be beyond belief as real history.

The plot is patterned so that every time things seem to be going well something very bad happens, over and over and over. Then, immediately after, the "good" people rise to the top again. For example, the construction project is finally going well when a nasty earl and his knights burn down the village and kill the master builder in charge. Then his son takes over and completes one section of the building, but while the first mass is underway the roof falls in. A bit later the master builder's stepson shows up to complete the cathedral. This pattern is also repeated in the many subplots. Eventually the story falters because the reader has come to know that no matter how dark the outlook seems, right will eventually prevail.

When Follett's characters are good, they are very, very good, and when they are bad, they are horrid. Only a few of the supporting characters show any shades of grey, but they redeem themselves and turn to the white. We have a good monk and a bad monk (who is always dressed in black), two good builders (with women who love them) and one bad builder (who is impotent), and two good women (who are beautiful, with liquid eyes and lustrous hair) and a bad woman (who is hideously ugly, with boils all over her face).

Also following the formula of the more lurid branch of the fantasy genre, this novel is filled with graphic violence and graphic sex, both consensual and forced.

Unexpectedly, the most specific historic details in the book concern the cathedral itself -- the floor plans and challenges of a vast construction built of stone designed to last for hundreds of years. Although many of the technical aspects were hard to understand, it did make me long to see some of the grand cathedrals of Europe for myself.

Even though I don't consider this a historical novel, despite its backdrop, I still found it to be quite entertaining to read, maybe even because of its very predictability. It's often very comforting to know the good guys from the bad guys and to be able to anticipate that everything will come out all right in the end. That's probably why small children like to listen to the same books over and over again. That's probably why The Lord of the Rings is my most frequently re-read book. This was and continues to be a very popular novel.