Customer Reviews

Fall of Giants: Book One of the Century Trilogy

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Fall of Giants was an interesting and entertaining read and supplied me with some valuable historical facts. As usual with Follett, the story is better than the actual writing, which is at times limited to simple declarative sentences. I have accepted this in previous Follett works because the story lines are engrossing.

However, I was a bit put off by the political views that crept up on me. The forces that led to WW I were depicted as black or white, good or bad, with the good almost exclusively the forces represented by lower socioeconomic classes. Those who had more money, power, or influence, always achieved their circumstances through luck, inheritance, or evil, never through their own hard work, while the downtrodden were noble, hard-working, and stepped on by the bosses. The business owners were all evil, making their livings on the backs of the workers, with no saving graces at all. I was halfway through the book before I realized I was reading a socialist tract.

Events in our world are rarely so well defined.

so amazing i could not go to bed i stayed up for days reading this novel. i think i have insomnia now.

Ken Follett starts with a vast canvas for his historical novel set in the second decade of the 20th century. The action takes place in Wales, England, France, Germany, Russia, and the US, and as a historical novel encompasses many actual historical figures and events, with WWI of course central to the plot. Follett has clearly done his homework on the historical setting.

Follett also does an admirable job of reminding us of the true causes of The Great War, and its tremendous cost and folly. He reminds us how closely related are the monarchies and ruling classes of Britain, Russia and Germany, something made even clearer as he weaves the theme of empowerment and equality throughout the novel. Working class characters struggle in their dead-end jobs and in their relations with the ruling class; the British struggle for universal suffrage; the Russians' struggle and revolt against their tsar; and even in the US, with its egalitarian roots, the struggle is still evident, with divisions by class, position, new vs. old money, and even physical attributes.

With all this promise, it's unfortunate that Follett fails to deliver, unable to paint more than the broadest strokes on his canvas. Characters are poorly developed, and seem primarily a vehicle to stitch the plot together and to advance the themes - worthwhile roles, but they need to come to life, too, if we're to engage with the story. As it is, their shallowness makes the narrative mechanical and so much less enjoyable.

For example, characters often pop up half way around the world with the flimsiest of reasons, then appear back again to their home turf - apparently just so they can be present at some historical event. Descriptions of characters or their motives or backgrounds are repeated a few pages on, and often characters seem to fall in love after just a few minutes of conversation and then to quickly imagine themselves married and settled. Because of their lack of depth and Follett's direct, simplistic language, the characters' love lives and (frequent) intimate moments are clumsy and emotionless.

This is the first historical novel I've read in over twenty years, since reading James Clavell's excellent body of work, and unfortunately for both Follett and the reader, there are far better in this genre by authors with more refined skills and a richer grasp of the English language. For a long, light read it's passable, but few will remember this almost 1000 page tome in a few years. Let's hope the remaining two books in this trilogy deliver better.

What a great series of stories woven together! I am curious about why the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge was not acknowledged? My grandfather survived " three years and 14 days...in the greatest battles of WWI, and yet there is very little mention of how a fledgling country out-smarted an army that had, literally, been stuck in the mud, for a very long time? Perhaps the research should include all the parties that were involved in the "Fall of Giants"?!!Wendy Fish

The cast of characters is long and the story is epic. Fall of Giants follows the lives of five interrelated families: American, Russian, English, German, and Welsh. We follow these families as they move through life during the times of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the hard struggle for women's right to vote.

Billy Williams is a thirteen-year-old boy who enters the mines on the day of this 13th birthday. He has now become a man like so many other 13-year-olds before him in the tiny Welsh town of Aberowen. Gus Dewar is an American law student who is rejected in love but finds a new career working for then President, Woodrow Wilson, in the White House.

Grigori and Lev Peshkov, two Russian brothers who were orphaned set out on very different paths half a world away from each other when their plan to emigrate to the United States falls apart because of the war, conscription, and the revolution.

Billy's sister, Ethel, is a housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts and takes a fateful step above her station as housekeeper just as Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German embassy in London.

Each of these characters and a raft of others find their lives entangled as, in a saga of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity. The story moves from Washington, D.C. to St. Petersburg, Russia, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the hallways of power to the bedrooms of the mighty and beyond.

Although the story was good, I was a tad disappointed as I did not find this story nearly as good as `Pillars of the Earth' or `World Without End'. I think we were spoiled with those two novels and anything less than that is going to be a disappointment. I'm hoping the second book in the trilogy coming out in the Fall of 2011 will be much better than Fall of Giants.

I was very happy to see that Ken Follett had applied his talent for research and spinning a yarn to the events of the 20th century. The book starts in 1914 and presents the events in Europe that paved the way to WWI. It covers the war, the revolutions in Russia, and their aftermath. The scope of the book is immense, and it leads to its main weakness - too many characters telling their stories. As a result, Follett doesn't spend as much time with each character at the beginning of the book as would be necessary for the reader to connect with them emotionally. So unless you are very interested in the European politics of the early 20th century, the beginning of the book may turn out to be less than exciting. Fortunately, the characters become well familiar as the story develops, and offer the reader a close look at different social classes in the main countries involved in the war and revolution. Another small flaw, in my opinion, is that one of the central characters, Gus, starts as a strong man, who will fight for his views, but then suddenly turns into a wimp. Yet all-in-all, this 900+ word book reads very well and paints a detailed picture of the world torn apart by the universal ineptness of the ruling classes.

Billy Williams went down the pit in Aberowen, South Wales.'

The day was 22 June 1911, and Billy was 13 years old.

Spanning the years from 1911 to 1924, this novel touches on events during this period in Europe, Russia and the USA as they impact on members of five families from very different backgrounds. These years encompass many of the tumultuous events of the early 20th century: the events leading to the Great War; the war itself; the fight for women's suffrage; and the Bolshevik Revolution; as well as the opportunities seized by some as Prohibition takes hold in the USA.
Mr Follett brings this story to life through a multitude of characters interacting with each other, as well as with historical figures and events. There are over 120 characters in this novel, with the central characters coming from Wales, England, Germany, Russia and the USA. The central characters include an English earl, a Welsh coal mining family, some German aristocrats and a Russian émigré to the USA.

This is the first novel in `The Century Trilogy'. While the completed trilogy will follow the lives of characters through the twentieth century, this first novel establishes the key characters and follows their changes in fortune (for good and bad) until ending in the halls of the British Parliament in January 1924, after an attempted revolution in Munich is quashed.
I enjoyed this novel. At first I found the list of characters (at the front of the novel) quite daunting, but as the story unfolded I found that the characters and events complemented each other in a way which made the story easy to read and difficult to put down. My main criticism is that some of the characters were more representative stereotypes than fully fledged characters but this did not impede the flow of events.

I am looking forward to the second book in the trilogy.

`We are the future.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

I WANTEDT AND WAITED FOR ANOTHER KEN FOLLETT BOOK SINCE "WORLD WITHOUT END" PLUS ALL THE OTHER FOLLETT BOOKS I HAVE READ AS I AM A TOTALY DEVOTED FAN.

THIS BOOK IS OF THE SAME CALIBRE OF HIS OTHER WORKS.

I AM ENJOYING IT SO MUCH AND FIND IT HARD TO PUT DOWN, LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT ONE.

LEN HELSING

When a long book is also good, it is a delight. In contrast, a long book that slowly turns from indifferent to bad is a chore. Sadly, FALL OF GIANTS is one of those books.

Ken Follett, instead of coming up with three new ideas decided to stretch the plot of a single book into three, thousand-page, parts of a Trilogy. And it is painfully apparent. The story could had easily fit into a third of the pages and it would had been tighter and much easier to follow. A thousand pages novel which received little work and even less craft is too much.

And yet, for all its length the book never gives but a very epidermal and caricaturish study of its characters. You get to follow the honorable yet rigid aristocrat and his temperamental Russian-princess of a wife; the rich suffragette and the poor, single-mother activist; the level headed German gentleman and the his homosexual Austrian cousin; the young American presidential adviser and the spoiled daughter of the nouveau-riche thug; and two Russian brothers that could not be more opposite in character. However, apart from a name and a brief character-tag you get nothing. They all feel like stick figures drawn at the corner of the pages containing the story.
You keep turning pages because you are curious, but, after a while, you realize that you do not actually care for any of them.

Around these characters the world collapses into World-War I and everyone's life is swept into the cataclysmic currents that engulf the world. Strangely, the political decisions and machinations described are oversimplified and described as much more naive and open than realistically possible. And everything has a strong left-wing bias.

On top of being a bloated book, for some strange reason, Follett makes numerous clumsy attempts to exonerate the House of Rothschilds from any wrongdoing. Their British branch is described as "peace loving" whereas the role of their German branch is conveniently omitted.
In fact, it was the Rothschilds who funded Lenin, Trotsky and their Bolshevik party in taking control of the Russian revolution. This well calculated move (which opened up what was later to be known as the Red Orchestra) turned an allied nation into the Communistic bogeyman that fueled the Cold War armament race of the past 50 years - and seeded the global debt crisis of our generation.
For over 1,200 years, in war or piece, republics or totalitarian regimes, this Khazarian House of international financing has been puppet-mastering history from the shadows - and the House always seem to win.

If this were a mere book of fiction it would be just an annoyance. However, Follett claims numerous historians as his advisers and, thus, opens himself to valid criticism. For all his historic claims, the story he tells is more of an Orwellian re-write than actual history.

Pass. With extreme prejudice.

I am always amazed at the breadth of detail that creeps into Folletts mind as his story unfolds. He sets the stay so carefully and skillfully that you cannot stop yourself from reading and/or imagining what may transpire in the next few pages. I just love this guy and his latest book. Enjoy your read........Del