A bloated, lazy, basic, and predictable mess. The characters in this book all feel like they don’t actually belong in the historical period they inhabit, and they benefit from ridiculous plot conveniences that shattered my immersion in the narrative many times. This was a problem in Fall of Giants, but it is infinitely worse here (one character literally escapes from being a Nazi POW, walks across France all the way to Spain, is apprehended by law enforcement who then turn out to be anti-Nazi agents, and then happens to just end up meeting up with a character he met in Spain years ago and who he hasn’t seen since before finally showing up back at home in London in his next appearance without any explanation of how he got there). The characters from Fall of Giants feel like empty husks of their former selves and characters seem to just shift their personality traits, skillsets, and aspirations so often that it is a struggle to emotionally invest in any of them. The worst example of this is the way Follett treats Maud and Walter. Halfway through the book, Walter, a major character the reader has now known for about 1500 pages at that point, is abruptly killed off and his death is quickly glossed over. We never really see his devoted wife, Maud, or their children mourn beyond a throwaway line like “Carla missed her father.” Instead, Maud, who Follett led us to believe was Walter’s soul mate and who gave up her entire life as a wealthy aristocrat in England for him, dishonors this relationship and her lifelong pro-democracy values by hooking up with a Gestapo officer who is her children’s age and then tearfully confesses that she “loved him” after watching her daughter beat him to death with a frying pan. I wish I was making this up.
I have enjoyed, and even loved, other Follett novels in the past, and I am no stranger to his inclusion of descriptive sex scenes, but many of the encounters in this novel felt gratuitous to the point of being gross, and I do not understand Follett’s fascination with constantly describing nipples and pubic hair. Who is that even for?
The most unforgivable failure of this novel, however, is how it treats history. These fictional characters just happen to walk right up to major historical figures at key flashpoint moments in a way that is completely unrealistic (one English character on holiday in Berlin just happens to witness the Reichstag fire, walk right into the building, and come face to face with Hitler himself). While I appreciated the spotlight given to the Nazi’s often-overshadowed crimes against the disabled and the LGBT community, this 900+ page novel about the years encompassing the rise and fall of the Third Reich basically ignores the Holocaust completely. It is a glaring omission, and given that Follett isn’t shy about getting “political” and isn’t afraid of putting his characters in dangerous places that should be off-limits to them, I can’t help but think this omission was intentional. Good historical fiction should have its fictional characters impacted by the time period they live in, not serving as empty avatars for the reader to witness the “greatest hits” of a high school history textbook. In this novel alone, Follett’s fictional characters become U.S. Senators (what happened to the real senator from New York at this time? If the U.S. Senator from New York was shot at by a Japanese plane during the bombing of Pearl Harbor wouldn’t that be an important historical fact we would all know about?), give the blueprints of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union to the Red Army, and facilitate the Soviet Union stealing atomic bomb research from the United States. It is excessive and ridiculous. And speaking of excessive, I truly soured on this book and was viscerally angry at Follett after reading the scene in which Carla is gang raped during the Red Army’s takeover of Berlin. I know the history and I do not fault Follett for including the horror of the rampant sexual violence that was a nightmarish part of the Second World War, particularly in the East and during the Soviet takeover of Berlin. However, if Follett was planning on using historical accuracy to justify the inclusion of his horrendous description of gang rape, he failed completely. The entire scene is presented as one female character bargaining her body to a group of soldiers in exchange for letting the other prisoners, particularly a young girl, go unscathed. Why would the soldiers honor this agreement? What bargaining power did Carla have over them? If we’re talking historical accuracy, the Red Army raped roughly half the women and girls in Berlin (a fact Follett himself mentions in this novel). There was a way to include this and be historically accurate, and more importantly, not minimize the pain and trauma of sexual violence. Especially as a man writing this scene, I think Follett having his female character think thoughts like “this won’t break my spirit,” and then never having her talk about or otherwise process the trauma of what happened to her is unforgivable. If Follett wants to tackle sensitive and traumatic subject matter, whether it is describing an individual rape or addressing the historical significance of the Holocaust, I really think he needs to think more deeply, and maybe get some advice from people who survived such things, historians, cultural figures, or psychologists.
Overall, this book is a meandering, gross, silly, contrived, and unrealistic mess that falls flat on its face. I’m giving it 2/5 only because I respect the ambition of the project Follett is trying to undertake with this trilogy, and because, to be honest, I was not ever bored reading this book. The problem is, I was entertained because I found myself laughing at the book’s contrivances, rolling my eyes, getting angry, and taking joy in predicting with near 100% accuracy what would happen to each of Follett’s recycled characters walking aimlessly through their recycled soap opera sub-plots in a historical world constructed out of recycled card board. Don’t waste your time on this book if you are looking for an interesting take on history you thought you knew or complex characters who feel like real people.
I will finish the trilogy only because I enjoyed Fall of Giants more than this entry and I am hoping for some redemption.
The Once and Future Lit 