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BOOK REVIEW:  Back in November, I had to fly down to Austin, Texas, with my son so he could fence in one of the North America Cup tournaments,  and when I travel, I figure I’ve got enough hassles so buying a couple of new books at the airport is the remedy. Browsing away, I came on Ken Follett’s latest book, Fall of Giants. Now, I count on Follett to be a pretty good writer, maybe not great, but someone I can depend on for a good read. Besides, as I thumped this tome down on the counter, I joked with the cashier I hadn’t seen anything this fat since the telephone book. My son gave me a weird look because he’s never seen a telephone book. They went out about the time LPs gave way to CDs.  

Yep, at nearly a thousand pages, this is one serious, honcho book. But over the four days in Austin, I pretty much devoured it. The book follows the course of five families –one American, two British, one German, and one Russian – from 1910 through 1920 which, of course, covers the great cataclysm of the 20^th century, the First World War.  This was the war that spawned every other conflict that followed from the creation of the Soviet Union to the rise of Hitler’s Germany. The full cycle only concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The war also swept away the old order in Europe which was largely feudal and little changed for the past 1000 years.

So Follett is mining a pretty rich vein of history and he strikes gold with this book. Here, though, I’m going to put in a caveat. I checked the 900 and something reviews on Amazon, and Fall of Giants gets almost an equal number of five star hits and one star hits. Because he also garners a bunch of 4 stars, the overall rank is 3.5. You will either love this book or you will find it a thousand page long death march across a barren plain with hardly a plot in sight.  Probably depends on whether you like the period.

Follett’s greatest sections tend to center on the characters of a Welsh mining town whose only options in life are working in the coal pits. At least, until 1914, when they can enlist and become cannon fodder in the great slaughters of the Western front. Like a lot of English writers, he doesn’t do too well with his American characters. We are apparently too strange a people for our cousins across the pond to comprehend. But he portrays the Germans and Russians well. The one dull note is his English aristocrats which do about every cliché there is for upper class twits.

Still, Follett does one thing really very well. He is able to bring across the brutality of a class structure in Europe that would have been familiar to William the Conqueror and his Norman knights. He shows there were two types of people: the wildly rich and the appallingly poor. Not so much in between. And accurately portraying  one complex idea is about one more than most historical fiction writers can accomplish.  I’m in the five star crowd on this one.