Rather than puppets in front of a moving screen, his characters emerge as real people shaping and being shaped by the social and political movements that made history. This technique also presents a need for a grand cast of characters, which Follett creates with keen insight and intensity.įollett's characters come alive as they interact with the epic events of their time, reminding the reader that the the best way to know history is to understand the people it impacted. Follett takes this pattern and imprints it onto the other countries and families in the novel, giving the reader a full view of the social mechanisms at work during these turbulent times. Billy, Ethel, and their father represent the bottom rung of a society that is clamoring for respect and change, while the Fitzherberts represent an upper class that is blind to the needs of their workers and intent to preserve a lifestyle that is advantageous only to themselves. What appears to be a soft opening to a massive novel is actually a blueprint for its plot and an introduction to a class system that will corrode to combustion by the story's end. Billy's older sister, Ethel, works in the great house belonging to the Fitzherberts, the landed gentry who own the land and mill in and around the town. Billy is from poor Welsh stock, but his father, a union man, has kept the family dignified and respectable in their small community of Aberowen. The novel opens with young Billy and his first days "down the pit" in a Welsh coal mine. Despite its length and complexity, Fall of Giants is a remarkably quick, absorbing, and thought provoking read.
Nearly 1,000 pages long, it explores World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the women's suffrage movement from the perspective of five different families from five different countries.
In the epic tradition of Leon Uris's Trinity and James Clavell's Shogun comes Ken Follett's Fall of Giants, the first of a planned trilogy that will follow five families through the major historical moments of the 20th century. The first in an epic historical trilogy from the author of The Pillars of the Earth
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