Despite huge successes like the Eye of the Needle and The Key to Rebecca, I was a bit
reluctant to start on Ken Follett's ambitious Century Trilogy as I expected something of
a thriller style story telling, but that was not what I found opening Fall of Giants, the first book in the
trilogy, on the contrary I found myself meeting a Welsh coal miner family and
the 13 year old Dave who had his first day in the black and hot coal-mine far
down below the ground… not much of a thriller, more like a socio-political
story… but things changed rapidly and the author easily caught my attention as
he quickly started to weave the socio-political day-to-day life of this small
Welsh family into the big events of our European history.
This is where Ken Follett really is
impressive and ingenious, he ambitiously tells us the history of Europe, Russia
and North America by adding a second layer on top consisting of five families,
two in the UK, one in each of Russia, Germany and North America.
In the beginning these families are just any
families in each geography as the historical events takes all the readers attention as the author brings in so much details and insight into [unknown] persons
and events that caused and orchestrated the big events like the first world war
and the Russian revolution. But already in Winter
of the World, the second book of the trilogy, you realise that the author
has actually planned in details the way he is weaving each of these families into
all of the historical events enabling him to tell the history from “inside” as
opposed as a historian. This is very cleverly done and makes it easy to stay focused throughout all the almost 3000 pages. By the time you start on Edge of Eternity, the third and last
book of the trilogy, you are equally interested to learn what happens to these
families as to the development of the history itself – and this is again the
cleverness of the author because most of us are much more up to date on our most recent
history and thus to keep the attention of the reader the families and their destinies
becomes the driving force… fascinating and very, very clever.
On more thing, in a recent TV interview Ken
Follett told us about his admiration of his wife, who is obviously a strong
feminist, and this possibly explains why all his female characters are so
strong – yet another reason to read this amazing trilogy!
