The Pillars of the Earth

The Pillars of the Earth has the foundation of its narrative solidly set: the characters’ greatest conflicts are outlined at the beginning, serving as solid columns for the structure that will organize the most important events of the story, with actions always generating consequences, making the scale of the events gradually increase until the climatic end.

The novel’s various plots all gravitate around the construction of a cathedral in Kingsbridge, England, during the 12th century, focusing on some of the figures crucial to the venture. It has a simple structure: the Kingsbridge cathedral begins to be built, the villains draw up a plan to bring it down or paralyze the construction — being sometimes successful —, the main characters deal with the new circumstances, restart the construction, and the cycle begins again. What usually changes is the scale of the villains’ plans and of the consequences everyone must endure. Despite being a bit repetitive, however, the narrative more than makes up for its shortcomings with a fascinating cast of characters.

First, there’s the fact that our heroes here are easy to admire, being presented as smart and resolute people. Then comes the rule: the more a character suffers, the greater the probability of the reader feeling empathy toward them. And the main characters in The Pillars of the Earth go through long periods in which absolutely everything that could go wrong in their lives indeed goes very wrong.

For example, we’re introduced to Tom Builder, a master builder whose main dream is to command the construction of a cathedral. Tom is a strong-willed but poor man who is ceaselessly chasing his dream even if that means refusing job offers that, despite being too mundane, would have at least put food on the table. Tom is completely enamored with his craft, so when the narrator is following his point of view, the character’s love for construction and architecture infects the energetic descriptions of the buildings — in an excellent use of free indirect speech. The effect is great: it makes us not only able to visualize the landscape, but also fall in love with the buildings he’s seeing or dreaming of building.

However, when he is fired by his former employer, William Hamleigh, Tom desperately needs to find work to save his family from starvation. Early on, Tom’s technical knowledge can be clearly seen as he plans to build a house, and his courage is shown when he risks his own life to get adequate compensation for his job. After he’s fired, however, Tom’s life only gets worse with each passing day. The master builder is dumped on the dirty and dangerous streets of a politically unstable England. The lack of jobs, the bandits, and the famine all beat him down while he travels to Kingsbridge. Tom doesn’t need a common villain in his storyline – his social status is enough to take on that role.

At the other extreme, in the nobility, we have Aliena, daughter of the Earl of Shiring. Here, the troubled political background of the period gains the spotlight: with the death of King Henry I, the throne of England was left without a legitimate heir, as the king’s son, William, had died years earlier in a shipwreck. Maud, daughter of Henry I, is then named successor, causing enormous turmoil in her society due to the very troublesome fact that she is a woman. Her cousin, Stephen of Blois, with the support of the Church, then usurps the crown, starting a period of civil war called “The Anarchy”. Aliena, however, cares little about these events, as her greatest concern is simply not to suffer the same fate as her mother, who married a man she did not love.

The candidate chosen by her father is William Hamleigh, a well-known, handsome, charming young man, who also happens to be a complete psychopath. Follett contrasts the two characters by their personalities: both are described by their physical traits, their beauty, vigor, and youth, but while Aliena is gentle and kind, William is described as the devil himself.

But if Aliena thinks her main problem is the young nobleman, she’s still affected by the fatalities of the civil war, which end up erasing the relevance of her family name. Deprived of her status and of all the protection that it entailed, Aliena suddenly finds herself lost in a world she never belonged — and the implacability of poverty now begins to frighten her at every turn. Follett takes the opportunity here to make Aliena a three-dimensional character: if, as a “lady”, she was kind, beautiful, and affectionate, when she finally understands her new status in the world and realizes that her brother needs her if he’s to have any chance of survival, Aliena reveals herself to be a person of strong personality, capable of threatening and even killing if there is no choice.

Her journey is long and excruciating, without the suffering ever feeling gratuitous or unreal. Aliena ends up in almost the same position as Tom, hungry and without a job, but she still has to face society’s prejudice for the very troublesome fact of having been born a woman. In other words, she must escape the fate of prostitution, support her brother, and even miraculously try to recover her social position. And on top of that, her horror towards William Hamleigh is also shown to be justified, since the man, not satisfied with her constant social degradation, keeps searching for different ways to humiliate her.

In fact, the man’s entire family is characterized as one-dimensional villains who commit atrocities in exchange for power, wealth, or, in William’s case, pure sadistic pleasure. Follett spares no effort to make the Hamleighs horrible people. William is shown to enjoy stone cats to death, have the time of his life while murdering defenseless peasants or imagining himself raping Aliena and forcing people to watch the act. His mother, described with a terrifying appearance due to a scar on her face, acts like a viper, manipulating characters with her poisonous words. Meanwhile, her obtuse husband is responsible for the first great act of injustice committed in the book. Since everyone around William is ridiculously evil, the chapters that focus on him are not only suffocating to read but also almost repulsive.

Finally, the clergy appears to embody both salvation and damnation, personified by the monk Philip and the Bishop Waleran, respectively. Philip is a humble monk, orphaned by the war and raised by the Church. Because he has a strong personality and is a perfectionist, his work in managing an isolated installation in a forest leads him to gain recognition, initiating a sequence of events that put him in charge of overseeing the construction of Kingsbridge’s cathedral. Philip is tormented by the idea of committing the sin of pride, since admiring the fruit of his labor is one of his greatest pleasures. So, his conflicts are presented in a different way: the narrative displays Philip as the pillar to which all other virtuous characters need to cling, making him directly responsible not only for the cathedral but also for the success of each one of them.

Waleran, on the other hand, represents the corruption of the Catholic Church, supporting a network of intrigue based on the exchange of favors and blackmail. By vowing not to rest until the cathedral is destroyed, the bishop takes Philip’s position for the forces of evil, becoming essential to the plans of the Hamleighs and other villainous characters. The bishop, however, is shown to be more three-dimensional than his accomplices, thanks not only to his sarcastic nature but also to his motivations: what leads Waleran to hate Philip is not an evil predisposition but precisely… pride.

With the pieces on the board, Follett then arranges the events like a roller coaster, mixing betrayals with happy moments and alternating between periods of peace and great battles. The first great victory we witness, for example, is followed by the most traumatizing event in the life of one of the main characters and, even more tragically, is its direct cause.

The author builds a fascinating, ambivalent dynamic among his main characters. The presence of Tom in Kingsbridge is seen by Philip as divine help, although it becomes the catalyst for a great tragedy in the monk’s life. On the other hand, Philip is at the same time the builder’s salvation, because it finally means the realization of his dream, and his greatest torment, since Philip forbids Tom to live with his wife. The relationship between the monk and Aliena is even more troubled, as he influences both her victories and some of the tragedies that affect her.

The scale of the events also increases over time. Each evil plan of Waleran and the Hamleighs, however unsuccessful in its execution, generates consequences, and each choice Aliena, Philip, or Tom makes leads to new and even more elaborate plans to bring their downfall. If at first, Hamleigh needs only to threaten with brute force to paralyze the construction of the cathedral, in the middle of the book, it’s already necessary to manipulate a king to achieve a similar effect.

Finally, the use of the historical background also deserves praise. The characters live in a turbulent era called “The Anarchy,” and it is not difficult to understand the reason for that name when following the story. To achieve their goals, for example, Philip and Waleran occasionally need the force of the law and the king on their side. However, as the battles of civil war generate instability, sometimes crowning a king, sometimes turning him a prisoner, the law changes accordingly, constantly and unpredictably frustrating the main characters’ plans.

Despite its somewhat formulaic narrative structure, The Pillars of the Earth manages to captivate us with the increasingly huge scale of the events, the strength of its cast of characters, and especially with the complexity of their dynamic.

April 24, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 25, 2015.