'World Without End' by Ken Follett

World Without End, Ken Follett (3)

Can there be too much of a good thing? Concerning this book, I believe there can be. This is Ken Follett’s follow on story to ‘Pillars of the Earth’, set a couple of generations later in the same town in England. It has a similar premise of a couple of very capable likable characters struggling through life, battling the incompetent and evil people around them. At one point, I was reminded of Ayn Rand’s ever pounding philosophy (pardon my horrible paraphrasing): that the average will always try to hold back the extraordinary. While the story follows many events for the people in the town (mostly bad, but some good) and the technologies described are always interesting, the characters were too flat to hold my interest over 1000 pages. The two main characters are frankly too easy to like and the evil characters are always bad. Interesting book characters are more complicated and nuanced. I was tempted to give this book a ‘2.5’, but if you liked ‘Pillars of the Earth’, you will probably like many aspects of this one.