Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday September 26, 2010
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FALL OF GIANTS
Ken Follett
Dutton
ISBN 978 0 525 95165 0
985 pages
$36
Reviewed by William Sheehan
In 1989, Ken Follett, author of such phenomenally popular thrillers as "Eye of the Needle" and "The Key to Rebecca," moved in a new direction by publishing "The Pillars of the Earth," a vast, intricate account of the building of a cathedral in medieval England. "Pillars" has since become one of Follett's most widely read novels. Together with its equally vast sequel, "World Without End," it established its author as a master of the pop historical epic. Follett will surely solidify that reputation with "Fall of Giants," the first installment of a hugely ambitious work-in-progress called The Century Trilogy.
Weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages and sporting an initial printing of 1 million copies, "Fall of Giants" is, in every way, a Big Book. As the series title indicates, it recounts -- or begins to recount -- the chaotic history of the 20th century. Just as Herman Wouk did in "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance," Follett creates a large cast of fictional characters and deploys them across the globe, using their private experiences to illuminate the catastrophic events that marked the early years of the century.
The narrative begins in 1911, with the coronation of King George V in England, and ends in 1924, by which time the world has changed in unimaginable ways. The centerpiece of the story is the apocalyptic drama of World War I, which escalated from a local Balkan conflict to a global conflagration that claimed 16 million lives. Secondary public dramas include the protracted struggle for women's suffrage and the ongoing battle between the working class and an increasingly irrelevant aristocracy, a battle that found its apotheosis in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Set against this historical panorama are the intertwined lives of dozens of characters, all of them shaped -- and sometimes warped -- by the pressures of class, gender, politics and war. Billy and Ethel Williams are siblings who move from the hardscrabble world of the Welsh coal mines to the radical political movements of the day. Another pair of siblings, Earl and Maud Fitzherbert, are wealthy members of the landed gentry whose opposing worldviews lead them to vastly different destinies. Gus Dewar is an idealistic young American who serves both in Woodrow Wilson's White House and the trenches of France. Walter von Ulrich is an aristocratic German with emotional ties to England and conflicting ties of loyalty to the Fatherland. Grigori and Lev Peshkov are brothers left orphaned -- and embittered -- by atrocities committed in the name of the czar. One will find his way to America and a life of crime, the other to a prominent position in Lenin's Bolshevik Party.
These are the central players, and their complex relationships encompass secret marriages, upstairs-downstairs romances, ill-timed pregnancies and assorted acts of love, lust and betrayal. Unfortunately, these personal elements offer some of the most awkward, least convincing moments in the novel. Follett is neither a master of subtle characterization nor an elegant stylist. (A beautiful woman's eyes "twinkled with mischief," while a frightened soldier's "heart missed a beat.") In addition, the frequent erotic interludes are often overwrought, overheated and, at moments, silly.
Despite all this, "Fall of Giants" offers pleasures that more than compensate for its lack of literary finesse. Follett may not be Tolstoy, but he knows how to tell a compelling, well-constructed story. Once its basic elements are in place, the narrative acquires a cumulative, deceptively effortless momentum. Follett is particularly adept at balancing multiple storylines, patiently building a portrait of interconnected lives. And he consistently gets the physical details right. "Fall of Giants" gains much of its credibility through its precise description of a wide range of settings: the coal mines of Wales, the manor houses of the rich and over-privileged, the factories and hovels of pre-revolutionary Russia, and the bloody squalor of life in the trenches of the Western Front.
Perhaps the major reasons for the novel's ultimate success are Follett's comprehensive grasp of the historical record and his ability to integrate research into a colorful, engaging narrative. He's especially effective in describing the build-up to the war, when all hopes of peaceful resolution gradually faded, when arrogance, patriotic belligerence and monumental shortsightedness paved the way for the series of catastrophes that would dominate the coming decades. As the novel ends, Germany is struggling with runaway inflation and sinking beneath the demands of the Treaty of Versailles. A new political movement called National Socialism is on the rise, and a fiery young orator named Adolf Hitler is beginning to find his voice. Much has changed, and much will continue to change. Follett's recreation of those changes will occupy his next two volumes. If they are as lively and entertaining as "Fall of Giants," they should be well worth waiting for.
William Sheehan is the author of "At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry Into the Fiction of Peter Straub."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE WIDOWER'S TALE
Julia Glass
Pantheon
ISBN 978-0307377920
402 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Donna Rifkind
Julia Glass gets plenty of things right in her expansive fourth novel, but no feature is more successful than the book's artfully conjured milieu. In most cases, and especially in Glass' books, "milieu" means not just an environment but a prevailing mood. Here, that mood is giddy bewilderment. In a 2006 interview with NPR, Glass -- who won the 2002 National Book Award for her first novel, "Three Junes" -- said, "I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic, and that's the world I write about -- the world that I live in." This is certainly the world of the 70-year-old widower in Glass' latest tale, a Massachusetts retiree named, more whimsically than his Yankee uprightness might seem to suggest, Percy Darling.
"Colorful, crazy, chaotic": These are the hues of Percy's sunset years as he tries, and fails, to maintain some hint of stability while going about the business of filling his days in a "fashionably rural" Boston suburb called Matlock. (I kept waiting for some winking reference to the geriatric TV drama, but Glass has left this fictional town's moniker, maybe too subtly, alone.)
Percy has lived in Matlock for over four decades, raising two daughters in a 250-year-old house that's of keen interest to the local historic preservation society. Until his recent retirement, he worked as a reference liaison at Harvard's Widener Library, devoting many years to solitary parenthood after his wife drowned in a grievous accident more than 30 years ago. Now in their 40s, his daughters have children of their own; the eldest grandchild, a winning Harvard sophomore named Robert, is Percy's much-loved favorite.
Except for his plain devotion to Robert, there's little that doesn't complicate Percy's daily life. His older daughter, who recently abandoned her husband and two young children in Brooklyn, has returned home to Matlock without much of a plan. In response, Percy has agreed to lease his huge, picturesque barn to a local preschool called Elves & Fairies, with the provision that his daughter be given a job there.
The hubbub surrounding the barn's renovation is discomfiting enough for Percy, who likes his quiet routines. Then even more unruliness arises in the shape of an unexpected new romance, the first he has allowed himself since his wife died. Percy's love affair with Sarah, an artist in her early 50s who's raising a young son by herself, plays out amid a tangle of small-town coincidences. Sarah's son attends the Elves & Fairies school, whose elaborate treehouse Percy's grandson Robert is helping to design. Things become knottier when Sarah, prompted by a health scare, consults a prominent Boston physician who just happens to be Percy's younger daughter.
Fortunately for readers, these complications feel natural. "Odd is the flavor of my life these days," muses Percy. "I've decided to roll with it." His story would be engaging enough on its own, but despite its Chaucerian title, there are many more stories here than just this widower's tale. In a typical Glass technique, the author weaves Percy's first-person narration in and out of several other alternating points of view. We hear from Robert, whose friendship with an impassioned environmental activist might compromise his brilliant Harvard career; Celestino, a Guatemalan gardener with a thorny past and a justifiable fear of deportation; and Ira, a teacher at Elves & Fairies who's conflicted about making a permanent commitment to his boyfriend, a high-end divorce lawyer.
Each strand of this narrative macrame is surprisingly supple, offering a convincing illusion of lives roundly lived. The effect is one of remarkable expansiveness, in which a rather modest small-town story is able to incorporate all kinds of contemporary social issues, including illegal immigration, eco-terrorism, health-care coverage, divorce and gay marriage.
As she did in "Three Junes" and "The Whole World Over" (but did not manage to do in her strangely constricted last book, "I See You Everywhere"), Glass propels her characters through a world that is sometimes dire but also sweetly normal and often joyful. It's the Glass-half-full version of Lorrie Moore's grief-stricken novel "A Gate at the Stairs." Nothing about this many-dimensioned illusion is easy to create, and some elements here are weaker than others -- notably the dialogue. The older characters sometimes lapse into "On Golden Pond" parodies, and Glass gets the lively, profane patter of college students entirely wrong.
Even so, it's wonderful to see Glass recover the unforced flow of her first two novels, a rhythm that convincingly imitates the shifting fortunes and allegiances of daily life. Once again, she's proved to be a master of milieu, an old French word that means "middle place" -- the place in which all her characters, young and old, continue to engage with the world and where she, a novelist in midcareer, keeps refining their stories.
Donna Rifkind is a writer in Los Angeles.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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