Rent: World Without End
By Ken Follett
About World Without End - Book Description
Ken Follett has 90 million readers worldwide. The Pillars of the Earth is his bestselling book of all time. Now, eighteen years after the publication of The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett has written the most-anticipated sequel of the year, World Without End.
In 1989 Ken Follett astonished the literary world with The Pillars of the Earth, a sweeping epic novel set in twelfth-century England centered on the building of a cathedral and many of the hundreds of lives it affected. Critics were overwhelmed--"it will hold you, fascinate you, surround you" (Chicago Tribune)--and readers everywhere hoped for a sequel.
World Without End takes place in the same town of Kingsbridge, two centuries after the townspeople finished building the exquisite Gothic cathedral that was at the heart of The Pillars of the Earth. The cathedral and the priory are again at the center of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge, but this sequel stands on its own. This time the men and women of an extraordinary cast of characters find themselves at a crossroad of new ideas--about medicine, commerce, architecture, and justice. In a world where proponents of the old ways fiercely battle those with progressive minds, the intrigue and tension quickly reach a boiling point against the devastating backdrop of the greatest natural disaster ever to strike the human race--the Black Death.
Three years in the writing, and nearly eighteen years since its predecessor, World Without End breathes new life into the epic historical novel and once again shows that Ken Follett is a masterful author writing at the top of his craft. Questions for Ken Follett 
Amazon.com: What a phenomenon The Pillars of the Earth has become. It was a bestseller when it was published in 1989, but it's only gained in popularity since then--it's the kind of book that people are incredibly passionate about. What has it been like to see it grow an audience like that? Follett: At first I was a little disappointed that Pillars sold not much better than my previous book. Now I think that was because it was a little different and people were not sure how to take it. As the years went by and it became more and more popular, I felt kind of vindicated. And I was very grateful to readers who spread the news by word of mouth. Amazon.com: Pillars was a departure for you from your very successful modern thrillers, and after writing it you returned to thrillers. Did you think you'd ever come back to the medieval period? What brought you to do so after 18 years? Follett: The main reason was the way people talk to me about Pillars. Some readers say, "It's the best book I've ever read." Others tell me they have read it two or three times. I got to the point where I really had to find out whether I could do that again. Amazon.com: In World Without End you return to Kingsbridge, the same town as the previous book, but two centuries later. What has changed in two hundred years? Follett: In the time of Prior Philip, the monastery was a powerful force for good in medieval society, fostering education and technological advance. Two hundred years later it has become a wealthy and conservative institution that tries to hold back change. This leads to some of the major conflicts in the story. Amazon.com: World Without End features two strong-willed female characters, Caris and Gwenda. What room to maneuver did a medieval English town provide for a woman of ambition? Follett: Medieval people paid lip-service to the idea that women were inferior, but in practice women could be merchants, craftspeople, abbesses, and queens. There were restrictions, but strong women often found ways around them. Amazon.com: When you sit down to imagine yourself into the 14th century, what is the greatest leap of imagination you have to make from our time to theirs? Is there something we can learn from that age that has been lost in our own time? Follett: It's hard to imagine being so dirty. People bathed very rarely, and they must have smelled pretty bad. And what was kissing like in the time before toothpaste was invented?
World Without End Reviews by BookSwim Members
Now I am waiting for another sequel. There is a lot of English history to write about. Mr. Follett could really make it interesting.
I recently finished World Without End. I should have just gone directly to the acknowledgment page, and, upon seeing the name of Erica Jong, saved myself hours of wasted time. World Without End is full of modern attitudes about many things, not just sex. The time period is the high middle ages, the location England, but the feeling this book evokes is that of the Borgia popes and decadent Renaissance Italy as chronicled by, say, a Dan Brown. Religion is blamed for every evil imaginable. Forget the ample historical documentation of the Church as being the driving force behind cathedrals, universities and hospitals, forget about the many scientists, scholars and humanitarians affiliated with the Church throughout the milennia -- all you will be presented with in World Without End is narrowness, greed, illicit sex, murder, betrayal, hypocrisy, sexism and stupidity. Anything good that comes of religious life is due, not to the tenets of Christianity and the devotion of the followers of Christ, but to the inner strength of and resistance to Church teachings by the sympathetic characters. One of the most ridiculous situations is the lead female character seeking an herbal abortion from a wise woman healer (another sympathetic character) and then staggering off to the hospital run by the priory in order to abort and get cleaned up. And no, she was not raped or subjected to incest. You will find in this book that women who are raped and conceive as a result bring forth children who are a bad. Revenge is the vehicle with which all loose ends are managed. This book is utterly devoid of the action of grace on any character in the entire tome.
I did read the entire book. No one put a gun to my head, either.
Many readers have criticized the amount of "gratuitous" sex in the book. There are, at times, a good bit, but no more than one finds on T.V. these days. Also, I would hardly call the sex scenes explicit, but so badly written that they are almost comical. They seem to have been written from a adolescent male's point of view. Many other criticisms were from people who did not even finish the book. I don't think it is fair to write a crtical review of a book you did not bother to finish. If they had hung in there, they would have found that there as an explanation for everything that happened.
While I enjoyed this book a great deal, I gave it 4 stars because I felt that it was poorly edited. There was too much repetition in the book. For example, Philemon and Godwyn were described as being "obsequious" at least ten times making me wonder why someone didn't pick up a thesaurus. One also gets tired of reading about how plump Madge Webber is, that Gwenda looks like a rodent and other repititious physical descriptions of the many characters.
One other complaint I have is that the Catholic Church is portrayed as being corrupt. While there was quite a bit of corruption in the church at that time, they were not all bad and I wish there had been a few pious church leaders portrayed in the book to balance out the bad leaders.
If you are looking for a light read that will keep you hooked I think you will enjoy this book. I hope Mr. Follett will write another sequel. I would love to find out how Kingsbridge Priory survives Henry VIII and the Protestant Reformation.
Well, I am one of those people who thought Pillars of the Earth was one of the two or three best books I've ever read. I've read Pillars five times in total, pretty much once every few years since its initial publication. Pillars had a certain magical quality - a combination of riveting storytelling, larger than life characters, grand themes of religion, destiny, history, and morality, strong women, love, hate, redemption, and so on. Naturally, the question on my mind in purchasing World Without End was, since most sequels are bad, could this one possibly overcome the track record of sequels and deliver a reading experience similar to Pillars? Frankly, every sequel I've ever read for books I loved (case in point: Shogun) left me quite disappointed. So I was wary, though Ken Follett has provided me so many hours of reading pleasure over the years that I allowed myself to be hopeful.
Here's the bottom line. World Without End is a good book, and worth reading if you loved Pillars. It is not Pillars, but it's still a solid read. I will quickly net out the Pillars comparison for those who want to know how it stacks up. It has lots and lots of interesting history and "feel" for the time period, which I greatly enjoy. At the same time, World Without End does not have the same gravitas as Pillars had. Where Pillars had a handful of charasmatic characters who were archetypes of universal themes of the human condition and who were larger than life, World Without End has a seemingly endless procession of characters who are just life-sized. WWE has a secret as Pillars did; however, the secret is not a Terrible Secret on the grand scale of Pillars, just one of the many thousands of secrets that have transpired through the ages and been long forgotten. Where Pillars was about the grandeur and otherworldliness of building a cathedral, WWE concerns us with the utilitarian issue of constructing a bridge - more of an engineering problem than a transcendental challenge. I didn't care about the characters in WWE in the same way I cared about them in Pillars. That said, WWE is good storytelling. I have read ALL of Follett's books, and he spins a great yarn every time; no exception here. The enjoyment of escaping into another time and place is all here, just like in Pillars, though it's somehow less compelling. With Pillars I stayed up for three or four nights and missed a day or two of work, because I simply could not put the book down. This book requires more of a commitment, because it's not that hard to put down. When I finished Pillars I would've paid 10 times the cost of the book for another 100 pages; with WWE, by the time the book ended, I was done and ready to go back to other stuff.
One of the problems with having written the Best Book Ever is that, by definition, the next one won't be as good. That is the case here. But is it fair to expect the Best Book Ever to be superceded by the Even Better Best Book Ever? There is no sequel to Pillars, in the same way that you can't have a second first-love. There's only one first love; all the rest after that is fine-tuning and possbly recapturing bits and pieces of the initial thrill, but to expect the magic of your first fomance to repeat itself all over again is unrealistic and likely to lead to unnecessary disappointment. World Without End is a good four star book, and can be enjoyed on its own merit.
what happened to the characters. (sure there's rape, destruction and black plague but trust me its reads like a bad tv movie or daytime soap opera)
Okay (deep breath) first off, I am torn to admit this, and I hate to cap on such a tome of work, but this
book has none of the depth and meaning of Pillars.
I believe every author has 1 masterpiece in him; (Follett, Pillars. King, The Stand. Mccammon, Swan Song.
Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath. you get the picture.
And Pillars was magnificient.
But this one does not even compare. But I am forgiving and will read Follett again, but you should pass on this one lest it ruin your memories of Pillars.
Either I've changed as a reader or he's changed as a writer. Oh well
If you want believable riveting fantasy historical fiction try George RR Martin's series
Sincerely Bookworm the Villain
If you loved Pillar's then you will love this book just as much. I also highly recommend A Dangerous Fortune and Eye Of The Needle.
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| Published | 10/09/2007 |
| Similar Subjects | Literature & Fiction, Mystery & Thrillers |
| Publisher | Dutton Adult |
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| Purchase at | Amazon |
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