A Cathedral, a Villain You’ll Hate Forever

A Priory, a Civil War, and One Very Angry Earl’s Son

Here’s the setup, stripped down. It’s twelfth century England, during a period historians actually call the Anarchy, which tells you everything about how stable things were. Tom Builder wants to build cathedrals and can’t catch a break. Prior Philip wants to build a monastery into something that matters and is annoyingly good at politics for a monk. Jack, a feral orphan boy raised half in a cave, turns out to have an eye for architecture nobody in England has seen before. And William Hamleigh, cast out of his inheritance and humiliated by a woman who wouldn’t marry him, spends the entire book being one of the most purely hateable villains I’ve encountered on a page.

Follett stitches all of this around the actual construction of a fictional cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, and around the very real chaos of King Stephen and Empress Maud fighting over the English crown while the country falls apart underneath them. The history is real. The cathedral is not. The way Follett braids the two together is, frankly, the best trick in the book: you get invested in Tom’s obsession with pointed arches and flying buttresses the same way you’d get invested in someone’s obsession with anything, because he makes the stones feel like stakes.

I want to be clear that I went in expecting this to be dry. A book about building a cathedral sounded like homework. It is not homework. It is closer to a very long, very dirty, occasionally brutal soap opera that happens to be set against twelfth century architecture, and that combination should not work as well as it does.

The Good, the Bad, and the Genuinely Upsetting

Look, let’s talk about what actually works first. Follett’s real gift here isn’t sentence level beauty, it’s structural. He understands pacing across a massive canvas the way Tom understands load bearing walls. Every time you think a plotline has resolved, something else caves in on it. Philip spends decades scheming and praying and getting outmaneuvered by bishops who are worse men than him but better politicians, and watching him lose slowly and then win slowly is genuinely satisfying in a way few books manage over that many pages.

Jack Jackson is the character I actually fell for. His arc from feral kid who can’t read, obsessed with the stone carvings in a ruined church, to master builder who reinvents Gothic architecture almost by accident, is the emotional spine of the whole thing. There’s a scene where he sees his first pointed arch and it rearranges his whole understanding of what a building can be, and Follett writes it with the kind of nerdy joy you usually only get from someone describing their actual hobby. You believe he loves this stuff. That love is contagious.

Here’s my real criticism, though, and it’s not small. The prose is functional at best and clunky at worst. Follett repeats character traits like tics: someone’s “green eyes” get mentioned so often I started keeping a mental tally. The dialogue sometimes clangs with modern phrasing that yanks you straight out of 1140. And the sexual violence in this book, particularly what happens to Aliena, is not handled with much grace. It’s frequent, it’s harsh, and Follett occasionally lingers on it in a way that reads more exploitative than illuminating. I don’t think it’s gratuitous in the sense of being cheap thrills, but I do think a better prose stylist would have made different choices, and I don’t blame anyone who puts the book down over it.

Now for my tangent, because I have to say this. William Hamleigh is one of the best villains in popular fiction and I will die on this hill. He’s not complicated. He’s not secretly sympathetic. He is a coward who hurts people because it’s the only thing that makes him feel powerful, and Follett never once tries to soften him or explain him into redemption. I have hated fictional characters before. I have never wanted one to fall off a horse quite this badly.

Aliena, for all the terrible things that happen to her, is the character who gave me the most whiplash. She goes from sheltered noblewoman to wool trader running a business empire out of sheer necessity, and there’s something almost modern about watching her build financial independence in a period that offered women approximately none. I found myself rooting for her ledgers as hard as I rooted for anyone’s romance.

This is a book about the difference between building something that lasts and just surviving long enough to see tomorrow.

About Ken Follett

Ken Follett spent years writing competent, forgettable thrillers before an editor practically dared him to write the cathedral book he’d been talking about obsessively for a decade. He’s Welsh, he’s enormous (physically, the man is like six foot four), and he has said in interviews that he fell in love with cathedrals almost by accident while researching something else entirely and never really recovered. He went on to write espionage doorstops and war sagas, but this is the book people press into other people’s hands. He is, by his own admission, not a natural literary stylist. He is, by nearly everyone’s admission, a ferocious storyteller, and somewhere along the way that turned out to matter more.

If the Cathedral Wrecked You, Read These Next

• World Without End by Ken Follett, the direct sequel set two centuries later in the same town, for more Kingsbridge without leaving the world behind.
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, for medieval monastery intrigue with a murder mystery bolted on and prose that’s actually gorgeous.
• Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd, if what you actually wanted was the multi-generational sweep of English history stretched even further back.
• The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell, for the same muddy, brutal, political medieval England energy with better battle scenes.

You can grab a copy here: The Pillars of the Earth on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Why do you think Follett chose a cathedral, specifically, as the thing everyone fights over? What would change if it were a bridge, or a castle?
2. William Hamleigh never gets a redemption arc. Did the book need one, or did his consistency make him scarier?
3. Prior Philip does morally questionable things in service of what he believes is a greater good. Where did you stop trusting him, if ever?
4. How did you feel about the handling of Aliena’s trauma? Did it feel necessary to the story or excessive?
5. Jack reinvents architecture almost by instinct. Do you think the book is really about art, faith, or ambition, and can you even separate the three here?