”He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes out of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do some”He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes out of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it.”
There are so many memorable characters populating this epic novel that I would be hard pressed to even say who is the main character of this novel, but my favorite character is undisputed. His name is Jack, and later as he discovers the name of his father, he begins calling himself Jack Jackson. His mother, Ellen, falls in love with a man named Tom Builder. Jack finds himself nearly starving to death along with Tom’s kids, Alfred and Martha, as they trudge across England in search of someone who needs something built. Tom can build anything, but his dream, his most fervent desire, is to build a cathedral.
Jack is bright, unnaturally intelligent in fact, and it isn’t Alfred who turns out to be best suited to achieve Tom’s dreams (although Alfred is really good at beating the crap out of Jack on a daily basis). It is Jack who travels the world and discovers that cathedrals can soar high into the clouds beyond anything that Tom would have ever believed possible.
The backdrop for all these trials and tribulations that you will experience while reading this novel is the turbulent 12th century England. Henry Ist dies and leaves his daughter Empress Maude on the throne. This is extremely controversial because the nobles do not want a queen. If truth be known, they want a king, but a weak king they can control. Since Maude was born without a penis, this leaves the castle door open for her cousin Stephen, whom fortune has favored with a penis, to snatch the crown from her head and place it on his own. The nobles certainly do not want to work for a woman, but I think the issue that is even bigger is that Maude is very sure of herself, even one might say imperial. As her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, would quickly find out, she is a handful.
Civil war breaks out, and the people who suffer the most, of course, are the peasants, who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The destabilization of the civil structure of law also allows men like William of Hamleigh to do whatever they want to do and take whatever they want to take. He is an opportunist who switches sides several times in the dispute between Maude and Stephen, depending upon which of the cousins has the wind behind them at the time. William is but a brutish thug, a tool of his demented, greedy mother and then later a weapon of evil for an archbishop named Waleran Bigod (great name, eh?), who wishes to obtain more and more power at the cost of everyone else.
William and Jack become mortal enemies as Jack tries to build a cathedral at Kingsbridge and William tries to destroy the economy of Kingsbridge to bring more wealth to his neighboring town of Shiring. William also has an unnatural lust for Aliena that is one part desire and one part pain. See, unless a woman is crying, bleeding, and feeling anguish, William’s wee willie won’t work. Here is a typical list of topics with which William and his henchmen like to entertain themselves:
”In the evening they would drink beer and sharpen their blades and tell one another grisly stories about previous triumphs, young men mutilated, old men trampled beneath the hooves of warhorses, girls raped and women sodomized, children beheaded and babies spitted on the points of swords while their mothers screamed in anguish. Then they would attack tomorrow morning, Jack shuddered with fear. But this time we’re going to stop them, he thought.”
Jack is Aliena, and Aliena is Jack. They are soulmates, and though many disastrous things happen to them to try and keep them apart, I kept hoping that love will conquer all. I may like Jack the best, but I admire Aliena the most. She recovers from a horrendous attack at the hands of William of Hamleigh to become the largest wool merchant in the area. This is remarkable for anyone, but for a woman, a woman who has never had to work a day in her life, and a penniless one at that, to raise herself up to such heights is remarkable. She survives every disaster, even the ones she makes for herself, and finds a way to achieve some semblance of security for herself despite the overwhelming odds.
There is one more character I want to discuss, and that is Prior Philip of Gwynedd. The man who shared the same dream as Tom Builder to have a cathedral rise up from the ashes of the old church at Kingsbridge. ”Jack did not like Philip but he liked working with him. Jack did not warm to professional men of God any more than his mother did. He was embarrassed by Philip’s piety; he disliked his single-minded sinlessness; and he mistrusted his tendency to believe that God would take care of anything that he, Philip, could not cope with.”
There are times when I want to give Philip a good shake, but at no time do I question the sincerity of his beliefs. Even when those intent on evil ends are conspiring, even cheating, to obtain an advantage over Philip, he always stays on the high road. He makes enemies in lofty places, including the aforementioned Archbishop Waleran Bigod, who at every turn tries his level best to destroy Philip and his dreams of a cathedral. The church politics are so fascinating and create an extra level of intrigue in the novel that at times overshadow the quest for the throne.
There are a 1000 pages of juicy historical fiction awaiting you if you choose to accept this quest. This is not War and Peace, so do not be as afraid of that page count as reason would dictate, as the pages will fly by. I really needed some escapism into a different time and place, and this book served that purpose perfectly. As I was reading it, I kept thinking that this would have been a great choice for that long plane flight to Scotland last year. There are some graphic rape scenes, but they are purposeful to the plot and certainly are a part of a destabilized England at that time. Unfortunately, the very topics that William Hamleigh and his thugs find so amusing are a part of human history going back to the days when we were battering each other with sticks and stones. I would have to use another 1000 words to discuss all the other worthwhile aspects of this book, but I will leave the rest to you to discover on your own.
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