New York Times Review
Books of The Times
War, Revolution and a King Who Says ‘By Jove’
By JANET MASLIN
A lot happens on the first page of Ken Follett’s “Fall of Giants
.” King George V is crowned at Westminster Abbey. A Welsh boy named Billy Williams turns 13 and begins his wretched life as a coal miner. And Mr. Follett, who was once a Welsh boy himself but grew up to become his generation’s most vaunted writer of colorless historical epics, kicks off a whopping new trilogy. His apparent ambition: to span the whole 20th century in blandly adequate novels so fat that they’re hard to hoist. “Fall of Giants” begins on June 22, 1911, a time, as Follett fans may longingly note, nearly 100 years before the invention of the e-book reader. But the march of lightweight book technology is hardly its main concern. Mr. Follett has devoted this tome to the implosions of the British, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires around the time of World War I. It was also the era when the Ottoman Empire had its last sultan, but Mr. Follett overlooks that; after all, he has only 985 pages’ worth of storytelling space. Given the pacing that he prefers, that leaves “Fall of Giants” no room to spare.
It is the method of “Fall of Giants” to integrate large events (e.g., anything involving King George V) with small, personal ones (e.g., Billy’s first wearing of long pants). That’s how it tries to coax forth a grand panorama of history from a mosaic of everyday lives. And the political must become personal, as when the heartless coal mine owner tells Billy: “I don’t like socialists. Atheists are doomed to eternal damnation. And trade unionists are the worst of the lot.” Not surprisingly, Billy will grow up to fight for the rights of the little people.
“Fall of Giants” is so besotted with stark economic contrasts that the mine is located near the lavish Ty Gwyn, said to be the largest house in Wales. This is the country home of Earl Fitzherbert, who is called Fitz and is said to be the ninth-richest man in Britain. Fitz is married to the selfish Russian-born Princess Bea, a one-woman explanation for the Russian Revolution.
In the kind of remarkable coincidence that abounds here, Billy’s cheeky sister Ethel works at Ty Gwyn and catches Fitz’s eye. “What a pretty girl you are,” he says to her one day. Then he asks, “Have you ever heard of droit du seigneur?”
At this early stage in “Fall of Giants,” Ethel hasn’t heard of anything. (The book has a real penchant for short, perfunctory sex scenes in which men deflower instantly breathless virgins, as Fitz does Ethel.) But she will be a fast learner. The major female characters in this novel, most notably Fitz’s headstrong sister, Lady Maud Fitzherbert, are eager to achieve suffrage and assert their rights, even as they spawn enough babies to populate the Follett book scheduled for 2012, the trilogy’s World War II installment.
The women wind up in childbirth, the men in the midst of historical turmoil. And the more simultaneously these things happen, the better. So one Russian baby is born on the very night her father is personally helping Lenin and Trotsky carry out the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Mr. Follett patiently develops Russian, Welsh, French, German and American principal characters and plotlines. These people’s circumstances vary greatly, but their stories all feel similar somehow. Whatever their nationalities, most of Mr. Follett’s main characters enjoy amazing front-row seats to the great historical events of their day. So the Russian revolutionary Grigori Peshkov spends enough time around Lenin to describe him as “a real killjoy.” And Gus Dewar, an American with a low-level White House job, is the employee charged with awakening President Woodrow Wilson at a time of crisis, as the World War looms.
“President Wilson came out of the bedroom,” Mr. Follett writes, “putting on his rimless glasses, looking vulnerable in pajamas and a dressing gown.”)
Fitz comfortably spends time with “Little Winston” Churchill and with the king, who speaks fluent king talk (“Dear me,” “Quite so,” “By Jove”). Walter von Ulrich, a German military attaché, is in contact with the kaiser. And Ethel bears a son (Fitz’s, of course) who winds up in Trafalgar Square one fateful day, close to the king’s carriage as it passes by. “Hello, king!” says the boy. “Hello, young man,” the smiling George V replies.
Mr. Follett has more than enough temerity to engineer such encounters. What he does not have is any great talent for capturing real human interaction — not until his characters have mingled for hundreds and hundreds of scenes, and he has developed some semblance of a story. So this book is full of objective descriptions of meetings, battles, rallies and negotiations, with one Follett character playing Zelig on the sidelines. Frequent use of phrases like “Billy saw,” “Walter heard,” “Fitz noticed,” “Grigori watched,” and “Gus learned” do not make these events any more meaningful than they would be without Billy, Walter, Fitz, Grigori or Gus hanging around.
Mr. Follett, whose wife is a member of Parliament, writes far more easily about British people, places and politics than he does about the book’s other settings. He spikes the Russian sequences with bits of historical data about the revolution and uses none-too-subtle atmospheric touches to establish Russianness. (“There was a samovar hissing in a corner, and an old woman in a shawl selling smoked and pickled fish.”)
On the other hand, his Americans, particularly Woodrow Wilson, spout a strange, peppy brand of Americanese. When Gus returns from what he thinks is a failed European mission, he gets the following reception: “ ‘Failure?’ said Woodrow Wilson. ‘Heck, no! You got the Germans to make a peace offer. It’s not your fault the British and the French told them to drop dead. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.’ ”
And readers can be led to Mr. Follett, particularly on the strength of his most recent books, “The Pillars of the Earth
” and “World Without End
.” He had the building of a cathedral, the Middle Ages and the Black Death to hold interest, but “Fall of Giants” is less exotic. It is most memorable as a test of readers’ fortitude, a step-by-step World War I primer and a breeding ground for the characters who will appear in subsequent installments. However two-dimensional these characters first seem, and however much they spout talking points rather than human conversation, they have begun to develop interesting baggage after 1,000 pages roll by. If only they had gotten off to a less plodding start.
A version of this review appeared in print on September 24, 2010, on page C32 of the New York edition.
