The Pillars of the Earth

In the 12th Century, the English throne is being contested by two claimants. Queen Maud, the eldest child and daughter of the late king and named as his successor, and King Stephen, the king's nephew who has the backing of the Church and much of the nobility. As the civil war known as the Anarchy rages, other noble families take advantage of the chaos to their own ends, as the Hamleighs seize control of Shiring Castle after denouncing its lord to Stephen as a traitor. The lord's heirs, Aliena and Richard, vow to regain their birthright.


Meanwhile, Tom Builder, a stonemason left jobless by the war, joins forces with the ambitious Prior Philip of Kingsbridge to erect a massive cathedral, in doing so making an enemy of Bishop Waleran, whose ambitions will not allow the edifice to be constructed...

Pillars of the Earth is an eight-part TV miniseries, based on Ken Follett's novel of the same name. At its heart it chronicles the building of a cathedral in the (fictitious) village of Kingsbridge against both religious and secular opposition, around which swirls a number of real and fictional historical events relating to a bloody civil war and dynastic struggles for power. It has a notable cast featuring established actors such as Donald Sutherland, Rufus Sewell, Ian McShane, Matthew Macfadyn, Robert Bathurst and Sarah Parish, and relative newcomers like Hayley Atwell and Eddie Redmayne (who, if he was a few years younger, would have made a great Rand al'Thor if the Wheel of Time movie had ever gotten off the ground). It also has a reasonable budget (coming in at $5 million per episode) and excellent production values, with some great CGI and some nice Eastern European location shooting (albeit the fact that none of the locations look remotely like their actual English counterparts, but what the heck).

Is the series a success? Yes and no. If you've read the book you'll know what you are in for: lots of cheesy melodrama, a lack of historical accuracy, a dearth of character depth and some truly inane dialogue. At the same time, there's something fundamentally likable about this derivative story and its corny characters. The actors give enthusiastic performances (though Ian McShane is clearly lamenting the lack of the more nuanced scripts he had to work with on Deadwood and in some scenes is on autopilot) and, most importantly, the scriptwriter has squeezed the thousand-page story into eight episodes, which keeps it rocketing along like a greyhound on crack. Spinning it out to ten or twelve episodes would have resulted in longueurs packed with filler which the book suffers from in some sections. As it stands, the television adaptation doesn't really stand still long enough for the viewer to fully process its flaws (although there'll still be audible groans when William Hamleigh turns up to burn down Kingsbridge for what feels like the fortieth time).

Those flaws are legion but don't really seem to detract from the watchability of the series (although this may also be attributable to how terrible almost everything else is on TV these days). This is tosh of the highest order, then, but highly watchable tosh which does not require much exercising of the old grey matter.

The Pillars of the Earth (***) is available now on DVD in the UK and USA.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

The Pillars of the Earth was originally released in 1989 and was a major departure for Follett, until that time known as a writer of thrillers. The book is a sweeping historical epic, taking place across some thirty years of 12th Century history, beginning with the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Maud and ending with the martyrdom of Thomas Beckett. The story focuses on the hamlet of Kingsbridge and its growth as a churchman and a visionary builder, Philip and Tom, join forces to build the grandest cathedral in all Christendom. Their vast ambition is constantly tested by the machinations of Archdeacon Waleran and the jealous bitterness of William Hamleigh, a local nobleman. As the cathedral takes shape, the story moves on to follow the adventures of Tom's children, in particular his stepson Jack, as the task of completing the project falls to them. Above all, an old crime and a vile curse run their course across the passage of many years.

Follett's ambition is admirable in this book. A substantial cast of characters is explored and develops over the course of a thousand pages and many years of storylines. Whilst the idea of building a cathedral may seem a bit dry for the subject of a novel, Follett wraps so many duels, battles and murders around the event, not to mention a colossal amount of political intrigue, that the novel comes across as more of a melodrama, a feeling increased by William Hamleigh's rather cartoonish villainy. There's nothing wrong with a melodrama and The Pillars of the Earth is an enjoyable example of the subgenre, but this means the book lacks subtlety. Working out the black hats from the white hats isn't hard, although Follett does throw an interesting curveball towards the end of the book when a couple of characters suffer role reversals that are nevertheless convincing.

The detail of 12th Century life is very convincing, and anyone who's pondered how churches managed to fund themselves at a time of relative poverty will find their questions soon answered by this book. That said, Follett never really nails the alieness of medieval people. These people did not really think like us and their differing conceptions of the value of life and death are not explored at all. The ease with which a key female character becomes a prominent businesswoman is a clear example of how this book essentially features 20th Century characters translated to the 12th with some lip service to the laws and mores of the time. There is also a lot of sex - both consensual and rape - in the novel, a lot of which feels pretty gratuitous with no real story value.

The Pillars of the Earth (***½) is an ambitious and impressive work that reaches for true greatness but is let down by cartoon bad guys and a lack of character depth. As a melodrama it works well and it's certainly page-turningly compulsive at times (its extreme length isn't one of its problems), but there's a feeling of there being a lot more that could have been done with the story that Follett fails to achieve. The book is published by Pan Macmillan in the UK and by NAL in the USA.