World Without End Review
Miriam
I have plenty of complaints about this book. The characters are diverse but flat; the themes are of dubious worth; the conclusion is far from satisfying. Like I said, plenty of complaints. But let me start with something I can't fault: Ken Follett's ability to create conflict.
Conflict is the lifeblood of a story. World Without End sometimes reads like a book without end, but it's bearable, because Follett is constantly introducing new conflict. Although all of his characters can be sorted into "protagonist" versus "antagonist" camps, there is sufficient moral ambiguity that Follett can pit characters on the same side against each other.
Follett seizes upon 14th century English society as the source of much of this conflict. His obsession with architecture can be irksome, but it's also useful, for he furnishes us with rich descriptions of life in Kingsbridge and nearby villages. So much historical fiction is focused around the nobility or life at court that often peasant life gets overlooked. I also appreciate the look at strife between nobility and clergy, between clergy and city, and even among the various levels of clergy. Even without the plague, life in the 14th century was not easy. With the plague, I can see how it would become intolerable.
Wait, does this sound familiar? If so, then you've probably read The Pillars of the Earth. As many other reviewers note, World Without End is far too similar to its predecessor. And unfortunately, the differences are usually unfavourable ones. For example, this book lacks a sympathetic clergyman to compare to Prior Philip, who was such a great protagonist in The Pillars of the Earth.
In fact, Follett's portrayal of the clergy in this book is decidedly negative. There are very few, if any, truly devout clergymen. Most monks are painted as manipulative and self-serving (Godwyn, Philemon) or mindlessly obedient (the nameless monks who go along with those two). The physicians have little interest in progressive medicine. Oh, and most nuns are lesbians!
This lack of depth is an epidemic among the characters. Most of them don't change over decades: Caris at 10 is just as manipulative as Caris at 20 or 30; Ralph holds a grudge for two decades after being punched in the nose. And don't get me started about Godwyn. It's not a question of believability or realism either; I'm sure that there are people in real life as obstinate as Godwyn or as selfish and brutish as Ralph.
Rather, these characters participate in such shallow introspection. Caris is so focused on what she wants, but she complains whenever she has it. She pushes Merthin away, even though she loves him and wants to have lots of sex with him, because she doesn't want to become a man's property. I acknowledge what Follett is trying to say here about a woman's status in 14th century English society. Nevertheless, by the third or fourth time she and Merthin broke up, I was beginning to wonder if I was reading tragic historical fiction or some form of soap opera.
Then, after declaring for the final time that they can't possibly be together, Caris and Merthin get married. Conveniently Caris manages to renounce her vows and still run a hospital; conveniently the charges of witchcraft against her never rear their ugly heads; conveniently Brother Thomas dies at the right time, and Merthin gets to use the letter Thomas left behind to blackmail the king.
After making it into such a sinister plot point, Thomas' letter was little more than something to ensure a happily-ever-after for Caris and Merthin. I have to confess I'm somewhat biased against happily-ever-afters, so maybe I'm overreacting here . . . but it doesn't feel deserved. These two characters rejected happiness over and over, and Follett still settled it upon them at the end, even as they kicked and screamed and refused the honour.
World Without End successfully invokes England's rich history, but Follett's execution is clumsy. I say this having fully enjoyed The Pillars of the Earth; its sequel, unfortunately, is very flawed. Rather than a moving return to Kingsbridge and its inhabitants, World Without End is a cautionary tale that conflict is necessary to a story, but it is far from sufficient.
The story centers around the lives of several young people. Merthin and Ralph, the two sons of a disgraced knight, have very different personalities and ambitions. While Merthin aspires to be a master builder (and eventually to remodel the Kingsbridge cathedral), Ralph tries to regain the family position by serving the Lord of Shiring and becoming a knight. Merthin is intelligent and kindhearted; Ralph is proud and cruel, reminiscent of the evil William Hamleigh from the previous book.
Merthin spends most of his life trying to marry Caris, the daughter of a wealthy wool merchant. Though she loves Merthin and has a sexual relationship with him, Caris is unwilling to give up her own independence. As a young woman, she shrewdly helps her father with his business, developing a prosperous new way of making cloth; when circumstances conspire against her forcing her to become a nun, she becomes adept at the art of healing and a leader in the convent.
By making Caris into a modern mouthpiece, Follett shows that he cannot simply create and enjoy the world of the Middle Ages without judging it by his own standards. Though the book does contain a rich and fairly accurate tapestry of life in a medieval town, the picture is somewhat distorted by the insertion of such an anachronistic character. Despite this, I did enjoy the book and found it about on par with its predecessor, The Pillars of the Earth.
The main point of utopian and dystopian fiction has always been to portray a fictional society to juxtapose against our own. Aaron Clarey's latest book, "A World Without Men: An Analysis of an All-Female Economy" does exactly the opposite, giving the reader a cold reality check.
In the aftermath of the 1960s, much sci-fi writing focused less on technological themes and more on social and the psychological ones. Explicitly feminist sci-fi of the day fits well within that current. If you've never had the dubious pleasure of sampling such novels from that time, here's a few summaries:
"The Female Man," (1975 by Joanna Russ), depicts several alternate universes, one of which is Whileaway, centuries after a plague kills off all of the earth's men. The Whileawayers reproduce asexually and live in a carefree utopia. In 1979, Sally Miller Gearhart, founder of one of the first university gender studies programs, released "The Wanderground." This novel described a utopian world without men, where women possess telepathic abilities and use it to communicate with nature. This book was followed by "Daughters of a Coral Dawn" by Katherine Forrest (1984), wherein women establish the eponymous Coral Dawn utopia where they exist happily without the baneful influence of men.
In "The Shore of Women" by Pamela Sargent (1986), a nuclear war devastates the planet. Thereafter, violent and filthy men live in militarized bands outside of women's peaceful, advanced communities. "The Gateto Women's Country" was published in 1988 by Sheri Tepper. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, this novel posits a society where the sexes live separately: men in militaristic compounds and women (you guessed it) in an ecologically-friendly utopia.
Speculative utopias make great fuel for the imagination, but the genre clearly signals that it is a poor foundation for a real society. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland" (1915), there is no war, inequality, or conflict, and everything is simply fabulous. There are no mechanisms for dispute resolution, because harmony is simply presumed. Less well-known about Gilman was her barbaric opinions about dark-skinned people, so the imagined Herland is presumably not an ethnically diverse place...
It all feels a bit reminiscent of a bratty, 7 year old tyke who thinks they'd be better-off without any grown-ups around. There'd be no big bossy adults telling them to clean their room or eat their broccoli. No homework or bedtime. You can jump up and down on the bed and eat ice cream whenever you want.
To run the numbers and do the mental exercises would reveal that much of modern life has become so easy and convenient, a lot of women have been tricked into thinking that men are irrelevant to their well-being. Yes, women love to lecture men about all the thankless support that men get from women, never stopping to ask questions about how one-way the deal really is.
Somebody has to do it. When the toilet backs up, who will unclog it? Will it be the Liberated Princesses? How gauche! They're too busy eating Haagen-Dazs under a bodhi tree, telepathically bonding with Gaia's creatures.
As a sophomore in high school, I read the 1967 SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas while writing a paper on Andy Warhol. It was a poorly-written fringe screed composed by a barking nutcase, but I have to give her some credit: Solanas actually acknowledges some logistical problems after the men are (humanely!) liquidated in self-emptying gas chambers and self-cleaning voluntary suicide booths. She blithely evades further questions with the claim that "automation" would pick-up the slack in the groovy all-female world of tomorrow. And who would maintain that automation? She didn't say. Presumably other automation would do it. And that, in turn, would be maintained by still other automation. And so on.
One serious attempt to tackle this question was the 2002-2008 comic series "Y: The last man" by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. The utopia is basically calamitous. But let's not talk about half of the planet dying. What if half of the planet simply stops supporting the other half?
To that, Aaron asks: "...did anyone take the time to see if women's original claim was at all in any way true? That women were NOT dependent on men? That women truly and factually did not need them?" Well, like it or not, a lot of the single ladies in their 30s and 40s might find out the hard way.
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