Historical Fiction and the Ambition of Epic Storytelling

I read historical fiction mainly for two reasons. First: I’m a history nerd to my core. Faced with the rude post-high school realization that all those facts, dates and names meticulously lodged in my brain weren’t much use unless I wanted to become a social studies teacher, reading historical fiction keeps that corner of my brain appeased and content.

Second, a great work of historical fiction gives you that indelible feeling of being swept up in the epic storytelling of it all. That’s not exclusive, of course. It’s the same reason I’ve read every scrap of currently existing literature in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” universe and why I devoted an entire blog post to the various orders in which one can binge-watch the “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” trilogies. Cards on the table, I’m also a brazen epic fantasy and sci-fi nerd. Yet there’s something about being dropped into the middle of a particular place, in a particular time, and forgetting for hours at a clip that you’re laying with a book open on a couch in the 21st century.

Disclaimer: It’s apparent by this point that this post will be nerdy. It will be all about history. It won’t resonate as much for anyone who isn’t an unabashed history nerd like me, someone who hasn’t read Ken Follett’s Century Trilogy or who doesn’t love a good work of historical fiction. For the handful of people who starting reading this post to begin with and decide to press on, I salute you.

Before I go any further, I think it’s worth stopping to examine the meaning of the word epic, one of the most commonly overused and grossly misused words in the English language. The mangled Bro context of the word does not apply here. Same goes for any cringe-worthy iterations attached to “-win” or “-fail.” I’m talking about epic in the ancient Greek adventure sense. From Dictionary.com:

“A long narrative [poem] written in elevated style, in which heroes of great historical orlegendary importance perform valorous deeds. The setting is vast in scope, coveringgreat nations, the world, or the universe, and the action is important to the history of anation or people.”

Example: “Did you know J.R.R. Tolkein wrote an epic poem about the fall of King Arthur?” (Fun fact: That’s true. Read it.)

But back to historical fiction. Nonfiction works and biographies can be compelling as well, but a well-written work of historical fiction takes just the right number of liberties with its source material to plug an identifiable character or characters’ first-person perspectives right into the middle of extraordinary historical events. That’s why I’ve always loved Ken Follett’s historical epics.

Follett is far from the only author publishing compelling contemporary works of historical fiction, but he’s one of the most prolific, ambitious and consistently engaging novelists of the genre working today. 1989’s “The Pillars of the Earth,” Follett’s first historical fiction novel is, in my eyes, the one to beat. Not just for Follett; for everyone. It’s the gold standard of the complex plotting and narrative heights epic historical storytelling can achieve. I could write an entirely separate blog post on “The Pillars of the Earth“ and its pseudo-sequel “World Without End”, but for now I’ll leave it at this: read the books before watching the serviceable but ultimately unsatisfying 2010 and 2012 Starz miniseries. The book is always better.

As long-winded as this rambling intro has been, this post concerns Follet’s Century Trilogy, the final installment of which I recently finished.

The concept of Follett’s Century Trilogy is ambitious as hell. Follett’s writing career has vacillated between James Bond-esque thrillers and these generation-spanning historical epics, but he’d never before attempted a continuous narrative on the scale of the Century Trilogy.

A quick synopsis: The Century Trilogy follows five families — American, British, German, Russian and Welsh — as they live through, and often in the middle of, the most iconic events of the 20th century. The first novel, “Fall of Giants” (2010), follows the families’ intersecting lives through the events of World War I and the Russian Revolution. The second, “Winter of the World” (2012), follows the children of the “Fall of Giants” main characters through the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Manhattan Project and the start of the Cold War. The final installment, this year’s “Edge of Eternity,” follows the families’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren through the heart of the Cold War, the civil rights movement and all the other good (and terrible) events transpiring in the latter half of the century up until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union.

In what has become arguably my favorite mode of storytelling, the books are told entirely through point-of-view chapters. Like I said, it’s ambitious as hell. A series like this requires extensive research to accurately depict the history of it all, but at the same time Follett must do justice to the personal narratives of each branch on these continually expanding and intermixing family trees. While each generation takes over the mantle of narration from book to book, the characters whose minds the readers lived in for more than a thousand pages a pop resurface like gold coins in subsequent books, rewarding the reader for making it this far by compounding stories upon themselves and paying off characters you first met 70 years ago in emotionally satisfying ways.

A great description of how challenging it is to write a work on the scale of the Century Trilogy came from Follett himself, in a 2012 profile in The Washington Post.

“Certainly it’s easier to write a 100,000-word thriller than it is to write one of these bigger novels, which are three times as long and 10 times as difficult,” Follett said. “You have this group of characters and you write 100,000 words about them, but you haven’t finished; you have to keep making up more and more stuff about them. A regular novel is a snapshot of the major characters at some moment, probably some crisis, in their lives. In a novel like ‘The Pillars of the Earth,’ for example, you’ve got to tell their entire biographies, including conflicts and romances that can go on for 50 years or more. It’s damned hard, but readers adore it.”

Follett’s quote speaks to the burden of making this kind of narrative work as a whole, but he added a new wrinkle for himself in the Century Trilogy. A wrinkle likely demanding countless more hours of research, but resulting in one of the most compelling literary elements of the book: firsthand interactions with some of the most famous and infamous people who’ve ever lived.

This is the kind of stuff history nerds like me live for.

Some pop up for a paragraph or two; others spool out over hundreds of pages. In each case, the most striking characteristic is the depth to which Follett went to understand and re-create each figure’s personality, down to their particular speech patterns and subtle facial tics. We’re talking prolonged conversations, plot points and sometimes entire storylines with the likes of Vladimir Lenin, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., Lech Walesa, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and nearly a dozen presidents including Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Truman, Johnson, Nixon and Reagan.

During the prolonged 1960s chapters of “Edge of Eternity,” Bobby Kennedy surfaces often enough to be considered almost a main character through the eyes of George Jakes, the book’s ostensible lead and the character Follett seems, justifiably, to be the most proud of. Another character in the final installment, Maria Summers, has a torrid affair with JFK, and Follett does not spare the details.

I’ll get back to George and Maria a bit later, because Follett’s resounding success in developing and paying off those two characters highlights how, in a narrative as sprawling as this one, other characters end up holding the short shrift.

Deconstructing a literal century of storytelling
This is the part where I deconstruct and criticize specific plot points and storylines from the books. It would simply be too tedious to lay out and explain the individual character and family progressions of the entire trilogy, so I’m going to focus primarily on “Edge of Eternity” because it’s fresh in my mind. The nature of the series pretty much ensures I’ll call back to the other two books, but if you want the full and complete picture of how the Williams, Dewar, Peshkov, Fitzherbert, von Ulrich and eventually Franck, Dvorkin, Jakes and Murray families make it from 1911 to 1989, read the damn books.

Take a look at a larger version of the official timeline below for a more in-depth chronology of “Edge of Eternity.”

Overall, the Century Trilogy was a triumph.

Follett leans on a couple literary conventions time and again to keep readers interested, or add some drama to a particular historical moment, but it’s part of his literary charm. Part of the classical appeal of a Follett historical epic is the feeling of being deftly led past comfortable narrative landmarks in a tapestry of intersecting lives. There’s always a sadistic, weak-minded villain or two, given power by the Nazis or the Communists and using it to abuse and torment a main character. They always get their comeuppance, though. Whether in the form of a grizzly death, or more often a scene late in the book showing the villain pathetic and alone, stripped of their totalitarian power. He can get a bit soapy, as book critic Janet Maslin wrote in her review in The New York Times, but adding a few well-placed steamy love scenes–to inject a bit of melodrama underscoring a tense worldwide event like the Cuban Missile Crisis–keeps you in the moment.

Yet when Follett truly sets his mind to melding a great character with a gripping historical event, the result is marvelous to behold. With George Jakes, the lineage is impressive enough. Starting with “Fall of Giants” POV character Lev Peshkov, a Russian immigrant who cons his way into an industrial and entertainment empire, and ending half a century later with his grandson, a half-black Harvard-educated lawyer, George has a loaded backstory before we even really know him.

One of George’s earliest chapters, where he meets Maria Summers on a bus of Freedom Riders defiantly driving through the racist South, is genuinely terrifying. As is George’s ordeal with race riots, water cannons and the sickening brutality of Bull Connor’s Birmingham, Alabama police during the 1963 civil rights movement. George’s relationship with Bobby Kennedy, too, is layered and steeped in realism. The behind-the-scenes portrayal of a character like Bobby shows what the Century Trilogy does best–gifting the reader a sense of familiarity, the warm feeling that they truly knew him, through an intimate peak behind the curtain.

The 2008 epilogue, as an elderly George watches Barack Obama elected president, feels well-earned. The book was never going to end on anyone but George, Follett’s crown narrative jewel.

Next to George and the Dvorkin twins, who I’ll get to in a minute, Follett spends the most time on Walli Franck. The rebellious East German teen-turned international druggie rock star was always meant as a the frontman to bookend the erection and destruction of the Berlin Wall. While writing George Jakes seemed a genuine pleasure for Follett, Walli came off as the character in which he invested the most.

Walli’s arc, necessarily, is the most tragic. A quick point-by-point rundown:

Act I: He steals a van and barrels through a Berlin Wall checkpoint, killing a guard in the process. He returns via underground tunnel to rescue his girlfriend and bandmate Karolin, only for her to choose safety in East Germany over escaping to the west with the realization that she was carrying Walli’s unborn child. A talented guitarist, he scraps and scrapes his way into rock & roll superstardom along with POV character and lead singer Dave Williams. Walli pours his soul into Plum Nellie’s first hit song and many to follow, calling out to his daughter Alicia on the other side of the wall.

*Brief intermission*

Act II: In his loneliness he’s swept up in the drug-addled magic hippie love cloud haze of the ’60s, ultimately becoming addicted to heroin. In the spirit of free love he sleeps with Dave’s fiancée and breaks up the band (Follett’s Yoko moment). The band comes together again to get Walli clean, and in the height of the rah-rah Reagan ’80s, Plum Nellie holds a concert in West Germany, blasting the music through speakers pressed right up against the wall as his daughter and long-lost love listen on the other side. In one of the novel’s final chapters, the Berlin Wall comes down and Walli reunites with his family in an eruption of dramatic fireworks.

It plays out exactly as Follett drew it up. While I don’t think I ever connected with Walli’s aloof and soulful character the way Follett intended, the arc worked. Walli’s story had to carry the weight and the narrative thread of a father and daughter torn apart by Communism over 1,000 pages. It delivered.

Follett’s resounding successes with the most important historical events and his most carefully developed characters make it easy to highlight his character and storytelling shortcomings in wrapping up the trilogy. If we’re being honest, this entire post was half an excuse for me to put a heap of complicated feelings into words upon concluding a series I’ve spent over four years emotionally invested in.

My biggest gripe, and one I’m not alone in sharing, is the distinct feeling that the entire last half of the book felt rushed. Follett spends so much time in the period between 1960 and 1963–for good reason, what with the Civil Rights movement, Kennedy presidency and assassination, Cuban Missile Crisis and erecting of the Berlin Wall to cover, not to mention plenty of character building for the third generation of POV leads. Yet when the first and far-and-away strongest act finally bows, the novel is 600 pages in and still only in 1964.

As a consequence, especially once we hit the 1970s, everything from Watergate and President Nixon’s resignation on feels like a history teacher rushing through the end of his lesson before the bell rings. At this juncture, I wish Follett would’ve just committed and written an extra five hundred pages or so. Any reader who’s made it this far into the series would happily read a longer novel to see through satisfying resolutions and worthwhile historical events concerning the characters and families we’ve grown to care deeply about.

In the last two decades of “Edge of Eternity,” a handful of characters are either never fully developed or left as hanging threads. Crucial historical events, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for instance, are barely even mentioned. Russian siblings Dimka and Tanya Dvorkin, arguably the novel’s most dynamic characters next to George Jakes and Maria Summers, both disappear abruptly from the narrative when each needed just one more chapter at the very least for their narratives to resolve. It’s as if Follett felt he had to pick and choose at the end of the novel which characters to give meaningful final scenes to.

For me, the biggest lingering question was: Is Natalya a spy? For seemingly the entire novel, Follett dropped hints that Natalya Smotrov, Dimka’s Kremlin work affair-turned-wife, was always a bit too well-informed. She always knew critical information, often concerning the Americans, before anyone else in the Kremlin. Initially I even thought her seduction of Dimka during the Cuban Missile Crisis was a covert ploy to get an “in” with Khruschev’s inner circle.

Ultimately, I gathered that as the novel went on, Natalya’s feelings for Dimka grew into genuine love. Yet even in later years, Follett continues to reinforce Natalya being “in the know” and far more well-informed, often concerning American intelligence, than her political station would suggest. I anticipated that by the end of the book, as the Soviet Union fell, Natalya would ultimately confess her double-life to Dimka at a point which it no longer mattered, politically. Yet the book ended (with a pretty disappointing final Dimka chapter, I might add) and we got nothing. Either I’m completely off-base about some seemingly blatant hints, or Follett was in such a rush to wrap up that book that he forgot to pick up his own breadcrumbs.

On the subject of the Russian storyline, both Dimka and Natalya are left in the wind. We could’ve used at least one more Dimka chapter to get an idea of where the fall of the Soviet Union truly leaves him. Will he join the Yeltsin democratic government? Will he leave politics behind altogether? As a character Follett spent the entire book developing as an idealistic-turned-pessimistic sharp political mind, even a short glimpse of Dimka’s next step would’ve gone a long way in driving the transition home.

Dimka’s twin sister Tanya’s storyline was similarly left cold. To a certain degree it’s implied that she and her long-suffering lover Vasili go to the West and reveal Vasili as the man behind the world-famous dissident pseudonym novelist whose work has satirically skewered Soviet culture for more than a decade. It would’ve been nice to see it, though. Depending on the author, select plot points and resolutions may be more powerful when left to the imagination. Follett has always subsisted more on showing than telling, though, and here he fails to show.

It was also disappointing to see Tanya, a talented journalist whose entire life had been defined by a subtle strength of will judiciously deployed against Soviet propaganda whenever an opportunity presented itself, reduced to serving as courier and cheerleader for a man’s work. Tanya’s chapters in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Poland during the Solidarity movement were as gripping and morally challenging as any in the novel. Tanya does briefly question whether she should devote her entire life to Vasili, but the passive, almost subservient course her character ultimately takes diminishes such a strong and capable female character.

Follett’s shortcomings with Tanya are surprising given the range of fully actualized female characters he cultivates throughout the trilogy. Characters who, in the end, lived for more than their men and stood for far greater ideals. Ethel Williams/Leckwith, the pregnant Welsh housemaid from a coal mining family turned working-class entrepreneur, political reformer and nationally beloved parliament member is a shining example. Eth’s death and funeral, attended by thousands in London’s Algdate district, is a passage Follett clearly took great pleasure and pride in, savoring every descriptive sentence.

The list of strong female characters with engaging personalities and razor-sharp intelligence doesn’t end there. Maria Summers, one of the rare characters not affiliated with any ongoing family tree, exemplifies the struggle of a woman’s professional success in a sexist, male-driven government while remaining true to her principles amidst insecurity, doubts and personal tragedy. The entire line of von Ulrich/Franck women–Maud Fitzherbert, Carla Franck and Rebecca Franck–faced some of the most adversity of any characters in the series from Nazis, Stasis and the Red Army, yet always maintained their innate strength and principles in the face of often barbaric evil. I would’ve liked to see a bit more out of Rebecca’s character in the middle of the book, aside from giving Walli the occasional meal and caring for crippled husband Bernd. She was such a strong presence early-on and resurfaces prominently by the end as a German parliament member looking down on her sadistic Stasi ex-husband Hans Hoffmann. Spending more time on her political aspirations in the meat of the novel would’ve been well worth the time.

Sadly though, characters like Carla’s daughter Lilli Franck were reduced to a POV placeholders giving occasional historical updates. Lilli kept tabs on Communist East Germany and set the stage for the long-awaited reunion between her brother Walli, his love Karolin and his daughter Alicia, but was barely developed as a standalone character.

Other plotting odds & ends

• While I understand Follett wanted to explore rock & roll and 1960s counter-culture, Dave Williams ended up falling flat for me. Seeing Dave’s rise to rock star and pop culture personality was undeniably fun, but his relationship with Beep Dewar was so painfully superficial and for so long that it never resonated. I never quite bought into the Dave/Beep/Walli love triangle, either. Most of all, though, Dave’s realization of his dyslexia never results in a heartfelt scene with his father, “Winter of the World” main character Dave Williams, whose disappointment in his son’s perceived academic laziness was Dave’s driving force for much of the novel.
• Cam Dewar and Jasper Murray both played important roles, but for better or worse both characters were inherently unlikable. Cam’s personality never quite added up for me, and it seems Follett struggled with writing him. I think Cam was created out of a need for a first-person conservative perspective of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Watergate, Ronald Reagan and the Iran/Contra scandal rather than the desire for a truly substantive character.
• Same goes for Jasper Murray, whose journalistic ambition and questionable moral fiber were his most well-defined traits. Jasper was more interesting as a wandering set of eyes than as a character or as a journalist, popping up in the crowd during Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in Eastern Europe during the fall of the Soviet Bloc and watching firsthand as MLK is shot and dies in Verena Marquand’s arms. If only we got more than one Vietnam War chapter from his perspective. The horrific war crimes inflicted upon a remote Vietnamese village, which Jasper bears witness to and reluctantly takes part in, made for one of the book’s strongest chapters.
• As a consequence of simply having too many damn characters, mildly interesting fringe characters including Anna Murray and Hank Remington largely disappear from the narrative once Follett realizes he needs to start wrapping things up.
• I would’ve liked a bit more resolution with the “Winter of the World” characters. Lloyd and Daisy Williams, Woody Dewar and Volodya and Zoya Peshkov, especially. If one previous character would’ve benefitted from a POV passage or two in the final installment, it’s Volodya, a brilliantly complex Red Army Intelligence general and one of my favorite characters in the series. “Fall of Giants” patriarchs Eth Leckwith, Earl “Fitz” Fitzherbert, Grigori and Lev Peshkov got grand, emotional send-offs, admittedly with a poignant reunion between Volodya and his biological father, Lev. The ever-disheveled Greg Peshkov got his heartfelt resolution with son George Jakes relatively early-on, but in stereotypical big family fashion many of the middle children of the trilogy were somewhat neglected.

Follett’s ambition with the Century Trilogy was clear and bold, albeit softened somewhat by a hasty execution with the ending. Overall, it’s a well-written–if occasionally predictably plotted and characterized–trilogy, excitedly leading us through nearly a century of world history. “Fall of Giants,” “Winter of the World” and “Edge of Eternity” were all compelling in their own right, and together represent one of the most fully formed works of epic multi-novel historical fiction I’ve ever read.

No work on this scale was ever going to be perfect, but history nerds like me are all the better for it as long as authors like Ken Follett are fearlessly, ambitiously trying.