Book Review: Pillars of the Earth

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book gets two stars instead of zero because it looped around the fail bend with such velocity that it actually became laughably good.  The characters only exist to have things happen to them, and by things I mean rapes.

Seriously, the whole cast is made up of these weird, demented wind-up plastic figures. There’s Prior Phillip, a monk who’s virtue is beyond compare, who winds up and performs Hail Marys. There’s ‘rape n’ rage’ William, an evil spirit spawned from Satan himself who performs a hip-thrusting motion or a latent homosexual sidewards glance when wound up. Who could forget Tom the Builder? Who wind’s up and uses his hammer or caws like a bird, for no other reason than there’s nothing interesting about him.

If you like a novel’s cast to reflect any semblance of humanity, you’ve come to the wrong place! The good guys are awfully good, the bad guys are awfully bad, but don’t worry: THINGS HAPPEN.

The two stars break down like this:
1 – It’s oddly a page-turner and makes for great fodder for bitching about books to your friends.
2 – At some point it includes a sentence something like: “He put his cock in her pussy,” which lead me to believe that his twelve year old son had stolen his manuscript and re-written the sex scenes, snickering the whole time he wrote them.

Posted: October 23rd, 2009 under book reviews, satire writing - humor.