Ken Follett’s “World Without End” and the Parallels of History

A while ago, I wrote in my review of Ken Follett’s enormously popular novel The Pillars of the Earth that he relies on a melodramatic story, one in which the vicissitudes of history are rendered explicable and emotionally resonant through the traditional trappings of a screen or stage melodrama. In keeping with that mode of storytelling, the characters fit neatly into the story’s Manichean worldview, with characters usually fitting neatly into a polarity of good or evil.

Those tendencies are once again in evidence in the sequel, World Without End. Once again, we have two strong and (mostly) virtuous heroes, here in the form of the iconoclastic Caris, a young woman who yearns to be a doctor but finds her efforts stymied by the blindness and ignorance of the age and her lover and later husband Merthin, a brilliant young man and engineer who eventually builds a new spire for the cathedral. They are joined in the hero column by the peasant girl Gwenda, who struggles to achieve some measure of independence and to gain the love of another peasant named Wulfric. On the other side are the villains: the conniving and cunning Godwyn, who schemes and manipulates his way into becoming the prior of Kingsbridge; Merthin’s cruel brother Ralph who manages to eventually become the earl of Shiring; and (though he’s not a viewpoint character) the equally…