this book came to me with nicknames like “the brick” and warnings that i could skip over any overlong descriptions of boring things like buildings or breaking bread. I was mentally prepared for page long sentences and descriptions of city neighborhoods like i found in the hunchback of notre dame, but that’s not what I found in pillars of the earth at all.
the beginning was not what i expected, and was decidedly more nora-roberts-esque . i repeatedly wondered to myself where this was all going, but found myself coming back to it again and again as a comfortable thing to read. it felt like an adult version of david macaulay’s cathedral book, which i loved as the pbs television story of a town’s cathedral building. through all the setbacks and disasters the story was ultimately about the cathedral. the similarity to the macaulay work made it a comfortable and easy thing to read even if i wasn’t totally drawn in by the story.
eventually, however, i was totally absorbed by the novel as a story about privilege. who has it, and who uses it to what end? I’d never read something like this before that looked at a medieval society with this degree of realism, and the ways that privilege can frustrate justice as we know it now. naturally, our own time comes to mind and i have to wonder, for all our institutions that guarantee justice, to what degree do each of us use our privilege to get what we want and subjugate others?