Ken Follett's Century Trilogy

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!