Historical Fiction At Its Best: “World Without End” by Ken Follett

After months of exploring vintage fantasy, my pendulum has swung back 180-degrees to pure historical fiction, having just finished World Without End by Ken Follett. I’ve had this book since 2007, so reading it has been a long time coming. But I’m very glad I did.

World Without End is the sequel to The Pillars Of The Earth, one of the finest historical novels I’ve ever read. Although the sequel is set 157 years later, the similarities between the two books are stark. Both highlight the harshness and injustice of life in the Middle Ages, at least if one was not nobly born, and certain characters in the sequel play roles familiar to those in its predecessor.

The sequel introduces us Merthin, a brilliant builder who is the descendent of Jack Builder and Aliena from the first book. His brother Ralph plays the role of the violent knight, much like William Hamleigh. Then there’s Caris, the smart and resourceful daughter of a wool merchant who, similar to Aliena in book one, is trying to make it in a society that subjugates women. Merthin and Caris are the main protagonists, and like the first book, there’s a love story too.

One new character in World Without End is Gwenda, the daughter of a thief, whose tale shows how terrible and unjust life could be for the peasant class during the Fourteenth Century. Follett also gives us our share of haughty noblemen and corrupt churchmen, but unlike The Pillars of the Earth, there is no benevolent character like Prior Philip. Instead, Follett gives us Brother Godwyn, who quickly rose to the top of my list of villains you love to hate. At times during the story, I found myself wishing that someone like Uhtred of Bebbanburg would show up to put an end to the conniving priest!

While both stories are set in Kingsbridge, one significant difference between the two books is the period in which they occur. World Without End unfolds during the reign of Edward III, which allows the story to explore two significant events in the Fourteenth Century: the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death.

The part about the Hundred Years’ War contains the second account of the Battle of Crécy that I’ve read (the first being Bernard Cornwell’s excellent The Archer’s Tale). Those scenes, which are among the best in the book, are told mainly through the viewpoint of Ralph, who is fighting for King Edward and the Black Prince, and Caris, who is stealing through war-torn France in search of a bishop traveling with the king.

But it was the scenes involving the Black Death that really hit home while reading this book during the pandemic. The Black Death killed about a third of Europe’s population and people who contracted it usually died within five days. The plague, which ravaged England, puts much of what we’re dealing with today in perspective. One character even becomes an advocate for mask-wearing, hand-washing, and distancing the sick and the well, practices many monks and nuns condemn as heathen, believing them to have been adopted from the Muslims. You can imagine how well it works out for the priests in the end.

Overall, what makes World Without End work so well are Follett’s richly drawn characters and his penchant for storytelling. Most of his characters suffer throughout the story, sometimes in a heartbreaking fashion, except for the villains, of course. Few authors end chapters with a disaster for their characters better than Follett, and this constant conflict kept me turning the pages—all 1,014 of them—to the book’s satisfying conclusion.

The moment I finished this novel, I dove into The Evening And The Morning, which is Follett’s recently-released prequel to The Pillars Of The Earth. So far, it’s just as good as its predecessors. If you’re a fan of medieval historical fiction and you haven’t read Follett’s Kingsbridge Series, you don’t know what you’re missing.