Brian McKenzie

See, I was misled. I'm not a big fan of melodrama, and this doorstop (900+ pages) is a genre-defining example. But I was told by friends that this was A Great Novel, you know, literary, thoughtful, philosophical, enlightening. I was told that it was the Harry Potter of its time, turning reluctant readers into enthusiastic consumers of historical fiction and high romance, sparking the boom in equally thick historical tomes by such writers as Philippa Gregory, Bernard Cornwell, Diana Gabaldon and Sara Waters (among many others). I was told it was relentlessly suspenseful and exciting, exceedingly clever in its many twists and turns, and even inspirational (and somewhat anticipatory) for its portrayal of strong, independent women who defy societal expectations and do what suits themselves best.

So, where to begin? I guess with the plot and story structure. For its length this is a book with a surprisingly thin story: the smart, young and industrious (and it must be said, prideful) new prior of Kingsbridge (Phillip) wants to build a cathedral in his backwater village where nobody goes. Hijinks ensue. That's it. That's the story. Highly episodic and cyclical, the novel takes us through a simple pattern:

1. Big problem
2. Clever solution
3. Incremental success
4. Complication and setback
5. Repeat

This pattern repeats, I don't know, eight, ten times and each time we are meant to sigh in relief as the clever Phillip overcomes complications to get his cathedral done (and, sorry, it's no spoiler to say he does. I mean, this wouldn't be one of the most beloved novels of all time (no, seriously) if the whole purpose for the book were never realized).

And what are the obstacles and complications? Two unidimensional guys, Bishop Waleran Bigod (and there's a name dripping with Signifance: the priest who serves two gods, get it?) and William Hamleigh, the villainous, ham-fisted, moustache-twirling Earl of Shiring, both of whom oppose the cathedral because it thwarts their own ambitions and offends their pride and they don't like Phillip because, in customary good guy-bad guy rivalry fashion, he makes them look stupid. They conspire repeatedly to stop the construction using means legal (trumped-up charges), illegal (murder), political (changing allegiance in the civil war), physical (attack and plunder) and ecclesiastical (trumped-up charges again but this time churchy), but each time good Prior Phillip outwits, outlasts and outplays them. Sometimes he gets mad and yells, but most of the time he is serene, urbane, sensible and wise.

The story plays out over 54 years of 12th century English history, beginning in 1120 with the sinking of the White Ship (a maritime disaster that killed the heir to the English throne) and ending in the aftermath of the murder of Thomas Beckett, the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury. We get a Forrest Gump's eye view of this period as our main characters, despite being in the aforementioned backwater village of Kingsbridge, find themselves central to the political and religious intrigue of this period known as The Anarchy. Along the way we are treated to micro-credential courses such as Gothic Architecture for Dummies, Introduction to Feudal Capitalism, Pre-Industrial Labour Relations and Collective Bargaining, and, most critically, Medieval Gender Equity and Feminist Theory. Seriously, at various points throughout the novel, the too-clever-by-half (and highly articulate) characters lay the groundwork for socio-economic developments that took centuries to manifest in Western Europe and North America. I was actually a little surprised that Follett didn't have Prior Phillip invent banking and the stock market.

I can't really offer an in-depth look at all the main characters because they are really just character types. Strong and decent Tom Builder, the stone mason. Alfred, his bullying, thick-headed son who also becomes a stone mason. Ellen the mysterious, incredibly beautiful, forest-dwelling woman who carries a dark secret. Aliena (another Significant Name), the also incredibly beautiful, willful daughter of the original Earl (deposed for backing the wrong side in the civil war). Richard, Aliena's thumb of a brother, good for fighting wars but little else. William the sadist. Bigod the corrupt. Jack Shareburg, hanged mysteriously in the prologue, and father of Jack Jackson who was raised by Tom to be the Greatest Builder Ever. There are more but you get the picture. It's a clockwork novel, and though you hear the machinery creaking, it keeps its steady time and plodding pace, the action rising and falling until we reach the big concluding scene where the righteous get their reward, the unrighteous their punishment, the cathedral its grand opening and the future its path forward. It's easy to see why fans clamoured for more but hard to understand why it took Follett another 20 years to accommodate them. Once he did, he figured out what butters his bread and now there's no stopping him as he has written 5 or so sequels in 14 years.

This book will appeal to readers who like their lines between good and evil clearly marked, their heroes unambiguously good, their villains irredeemably bad, and their plots linear and well lit like an airport runway. Those who seek something focussing more on the conflict between church and crown, or the complex role of religion in medieval life will want to look elsewhere.

Religious people of all faiths eventually ask one (or both) of the following questions: “What is God's plan?” and “Why does God allow suffering?” And religious or not, I'd wager that more people than we would ever imagine have been faced with a personal existential crisis at some point in their lives and wondered whether life was truly worth living. Add to this some ancillary questions about what are the things that give meaning to a life and how does one reconcile morality with duty and you have pretty much summed up the personal themes this wonderful novel explores.

But it doesn't just work on the personal level. No, this is also a book about The Other – the strange, the unknown, the (pardon the pun) alien – that confronts us and makes us question our beliefs, preconceptions, standards and expectations. Institutionally, societally and again personally, the cast of this story are forced repeatedly to confront what they think they know, and to fill in the gaps of their ignorance; and repeatedly, what they find is not clarity but confusion. In its simplest terms, then, this is a book about the consequences of failing to learn.

Exploration and curiosity are hard-wired in the human brain. We are a race of explorers, and the archaeological record bears this out. With no new terrestrial lands to conquer we have turned skyward, and even as I write this, plans are underway for missions to Mars. We also listen in the remote hope that we will hear the telltale signal that confirms the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. And though, frankly, I'm not sure what we'll do if we ever receive it, this novel posits an expedition, led by the Vatican, to visit The Other in a replay of the 15th and 16th century missions to the New World. We know from our history books how those turned out, and a few dozen kilometres from where I now sit is the Martyr's Shrine dedicated to the Canadian Martyrs, so I wasn't completely surprised that the mission in this novel would turn out the way it did. It's no great spoiler to say that it goes terribly, horribly wrong. It's the reasons why it went wrong that make the novel so compelling. But let me warn you: as compelling and readable as it is, it's bleak. It bares the very souls of its characters and exposes them to the pain, terror and torture of learning the wrong lessons, like the spectator who goes to a public hanging expecting it to be a physics lecture. The reason for their failure? The usual suspects in tragedy: hamartia brought about by hubris and willful blindness.

The joys and horrors of the story are revealed incrementally (echoing a common refrain in the story) even as the characters (primarily Sandoz) are gradually stripped of their humanity. The climax, when it comes, brings the shattering truth that the shattered protagonist, his identity so thoroughly destroyed that he's no longer sure what language he speaks, must choose between impossible alternatives. In agony and permanently scarred (spiritually and physically); and dependent on literal and metaphorical prosthetics, he comes to the only conclusion possible for a man of faith who finds himself struggling to reconcile his belief in a Divine plan and the reality of profound suffering.

I've deliberately avoided mention of all the sci-fi stuff, i.e. the world building, the alien culture, the technology, for the simple reason that they are all McGuffins. This could just as easily have been set in 1647 during the fur trade but the author, Mary Doria Russell, for reasons of her own, decided on this setting in time, place and space. Really, it doesn't matter. Russell's focus is on how faith, certitude, and clarity of purpose, despite good intentions, can lead us to ruin. But to be clear, she's not indicting faith as the culprit. Rather she's attempting to show that faith alone is insufficient, and we must also use our brains, experience, and shared history to avoid replaying the same old tapes.

This book amplifies all the weaknesses of the previous books in the Foundation series: terrible dialogue, clumsy authorial intrusions, uneven pacing, overt misogyny, and deus ex machina endings. My sense is that if Asimov had come of age in a later generation, he would have papered his office walls with the rejection slips he would most assuredly (and deservedly) have received.

This is not to say that this book (and, by extension, the others in the series) is not a triumph of imagination. I agree with the many others who say that the Seldon Plan, psychohistory, the fall and re-establishment of a pan-galactic empire, and the development of a technocratic civilization are intensely fascinating and exciting concepts. And the early books do have their flashes of brilliance in execution. The flaws are all in the execution.

As others have detailed here, Asimov is just not a great novelist. He's lazy, for one thing, as evidenced by the lack of editing. I complained in my review of Foundation about the needless repetition of key plot points, but here it's worse. If Trevise said it once he said it thirty times in this novel that he was embarking on his mission because he didn't fully trust the intuition that led to his momentous decision in . We get it, and, as relatively sophisticated readers, we can be trusted to retain this motivation for a few hundred pages of uncomplicated narrative. As well, as the characters make much of the need to visit and explore a number of planets, what was needed was a writer who could build worlds, and devote large sections of the book to these planets, their histories, and the secrets they could reveal as our heroes sought to assemble the puzzle of Earth. Instead, we got treated to endless days and weeks of travel on a needlessly small spaceship with Trevize acting like an absolute ass, Pelorat sniveling and groveling for his attention, Bliss alternately complaining and mothering, and the plot itself absolutely foundering. When we do eventually get to the planets, we get a few hours' visit, immediate peril, and very little reward for the effort.

A second problem in Asimov's writing is his incapacity for making small leaps in imagination. Sure, he can conceive of humans evolving to have biological power transducers in their brains and powers of telepathy that work across galactic distances, but he is utterly incapable of seeing a future where women are more than objects to be ogled, dominated, owned, and used (I won't even get into his problems with intersexuality other than to say I've never felt so embarrassed reading something that purports to be from a “Great Writer.” It's as though he introduces the characters of Bander and Fallom just to point at them and say “ewwwww”). He also seems to think that a galactic civilization 25,000 years in the future will still run on Commodore PET computers and a ca. 1982 BBS despite the fact that Moore's Law was well-established at the time he was writing. Everyone who was anyone in SF circles had had more advanced ideas about computers and technology for decades by the time this book was written, and yet Asimov still thinks the typical computer will be disk-based terminals.

My greatest regret is with the dialogue. If you're going to force us into a confined space with three characters for weeks on end, you can at least have the decency to write dialogue that doesn't sound like it came from a late-Victorian-era George Bernard Shaw drama. Pelorat's use of “old chap”, “dear fellow”, and “my good man”, not to mention Trevise's near-constant disquisitions, became so grating that I impatiently glossed over their discussions. Trevize's unbearably crass treatment of Bliss and Fallom were even worse. At one point, he orders Bliss to take Fallom into the other room and instruct them “children should be seldom seen and almost never heard.” I started to think his irascibility was part of some larger plot point – maybe he was being emotionally controlled, maybe he was losing his grip on rationality – but it turns out, no, he's just a dick. Could this really be Asimov's idea of a galaxy-saving hero, a surly, pompous, short-tempered, condescending jerk? Or was this Asimov's own personality intruding as it did with Hari Seldon, Salvor Hardin, Hober Mallow and all the other strong men of Asimov's universe? I really wonder.

At the root of what makes this novel hard to like is Asimov's admitted motives for writing it in the first place: fan demand and filthy lucre. He didn't particularly want to return to the Foundation universe and it shows. I think his editor and publisher, desperate to get the book to market, or lacking the courage to challenge Asimov (or both), didn't have the willingness to make the extensive revisions necessary to turn this bloated, awkward, and dreary draft into a polished piece of SF literature that could provide a fitting end to the Foundation series. Shame.

My fascination with the Tudor dynasty began in my early university days and for reasons I cannot fully explaing it has never really let me go. From Henry VII's victory over Richard III at Bosworth Field to the death of Elizabeth I, England was ruled by a strange and volatile family that dragged it kicking and screaming out of its violent, feudal backwardness and made it into an early modern imperialist nation state. I recall reading eagerly the course text (I cannot for the life of me remember the author but I can very vividly picture the book's cover; accursed aging!) and took copious notes during lectures. I got A's on my essays, and flatter myself that I impressed the professor with my depth of reading.

And it was in this reading that I first encountered Thomas Cromwell. History generally hasn't been kind to him, and in both history and literature he has been portrayed as the villain (more correctly, the villain) of the Tudor period due to his work on Henry VIII's behalf in disposing of Catherine of Aragon, securing the marriage to (and subsequent beheading of) Anne Boleyn, the dissolution of the monasteries, and, of course, the Protestant Reformation in England. As a high school English teacher I reinforced this perception of him through teaching the play A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, which adds a few additional layers to his reputation: not only was he bad to Henry's assorted wives, but he was also a vindictive, jealous, petty bully who manipulated Henry into executing Sir Thomas More, one of the leading intellectuals of Europe and a man renowned for his faith. Bolt's play, and the subsequent 1966 movie adaptation starring Leo McKern as Cromwell, is probably the reason most people think of Cromwell so negatively, and its influence is clearly felt throughout the novel.

Mantel clearly set out to take advantage of the huge resurgence in interest in Tudor history that began in the 1990s with novels (Antonia Fraser, Phillippa Gregory), histories (Alison Weir, Peter Ackroyd, Tracy Borman) and even TV series (most notably The Tudors). But, she must have wondered, what's my angle? What would be a fresh, interesting perspective on this wildly erratic period of history? And her answer, of course, was to centre Cromwell and retell the story through his eyes. Is he really the bad guy history has made him out to be? What were his motivations? His desires? His objectives?

Mantel seeks to answer these questions and more as she provides Cromwell with an origin story that evokes pity and admiration. In her telling, Cromwell was the son of a violent, abusive blacksmith from the slums of Putney who left home at 15 and sold himself as a soldier to the French. Tough, smart, and highly adept at learning languages, he reinvented himself multiple times as an accountant, lawyer, merchant, businessman and banker all before he entered into the service of Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York. Under Wolsey he blossomed further to become first advisor, then privy councillor, then personal secretary to Henry VIII on the strength of a) his uncompromising willingness to speak truth to power and b) his effectiveness in disposing of Henry's problems. A nobleman getting out of line? Send Cromwell to have a little talk. Debts mounting and revenues faltering? Cromwell will balance the books again. Marriage inconvenient? Get Cromwell to draft some new laws. Hassles with the Pope? Cromwell will sever relations.

Cromwell here is a kind and loving husband and father who reads bedtime stories with his youngest daughter and crafts homemade angel wings for her to wear in the family's Christmas pageant. He graciously takes in the sons of prominent houses to train them in the law, business, accounting, mercantile trading, and (more subtly) espionage. He's glib and witty, bordering on insolent with his superiors (Norfolk: ‘I spoke to the king for you and he is also content. You will take his instructions in the Commons. And mine.' Cromwell: ‘Will they be the same, my lord?'). He adores Wolsey and demonstrates unwavering loyalty, telling an aggrieved Henry who's badmouthing him “I have never had anything from the cardinal other than kindness.” So he's courageous too, standing in the wind that Henry blows, and refusing to cower before him.

But recasting Cromwell as the (for want of a better term) tragic hero of the piece means seeing everyone else through his eyes. Henry VIII, long portrayed as blustering, bellicose and belligerent, is presented here as insecure, impulsive, immature and highly malleable, haunted by the ghost of his brother Arthur, who, had he lived, would have been king after Henry VII, keenly aware that he was never intended to rule. He's as horny as a teenager (and, apparently, about as effective), fragile, and clever with a prodigious capacity for compartmentalizing his life. Sir Thomas More is angry, bitter, vicious and cruel, almost gleefully torturing and burning Protestant heretics. He's also self-righteous, condescending, resentful and dismissive toward Cromwell who does his level best to protect More from himself and prevent his execution. Catherine of Aragon is whiny, sickly and vacillating, sometimes The Queen, sometimes the victim, sometimes the desperate petitioner for the King's mercy. Anne Boleyn (to whom he is deeply attracted along with her sister Mary) is manipulative and sly, sexually dominant (and, despite her claims of virginity, probably highly experienced), and ruthless. Wolsey is generous in spirit, slavishly devoted to Henry, and though corrupted by his wealth and years in office, immensely likeable. He teaches Cromwell statecraft, how to work the king, how to get around the nobles who swarm on Henry for favour like flies after honey and, most importantly, how to be true to himself.

What is most engaging about this novel is not the palace intrigues or political machinations: no, it's the way Mantel carefully structures each scene in such a way to make Cromwell emerge the winner. He seems to do everything exactly right, say everything exactly right, know everything exactly right, and, as a result, come up with exactly the right outcomes. Things we shrink from, like the execution of More, seem to emerge logically and naturally, certainly not the fault of Cromwell who did everything he could to save him. If More died, it was due to his own stubbornness and sinful desire to be a martyr. What else could a good and reasonable man like Cromwelll have done? If Catherine was set aside and Henry made supreme head of the church in England, was it not due to the intransigence of the Pope and the Spanish crown who held the gun to his head? Clearly they didn't understand the pressures, the threat of a return of civil war. What choice did they leave Henry? And those monasteries? Dens of iniquity (‘May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organise a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery?'). Break them up, confiscate their wealth for the good of the realm. The monks will actually be grateful.

It doesn't matter that (or if) this is revisionist history. It doesn't matter that this Cromwell is probably not any closer to the real one than Bolt's eye-rolling, moustachio twirler. What matters is that Mantel has a firm grasp on history, a good ear for dialogue, and a sharp sense of how to recast the ambiguous in certitude with a little clever characterization. Cromwell is her Macbeth, and we are, with this first part of the trilogy, witnessing his rise and catching mere glimpses of the flaws that will eventually (spoiler alert) result in his fall from grace and death. It's a hell of a ride, and worth every moment.

Like many others, I have read this book a number of times because it has a fascinating and irresistible concept: the fall of an empire. Asimov, by his own admission, drew on historical examples - mostly the Roman Empire - so a lot of the story contains plausible and reasonably sensible portrayals of how such a collapse would occur. I also very much enjoy the very American subtext of the conflict between individualism and collectivism, and the much broader philosophical conflict between determinism and free will.

But (and you knew a but was coming) the problems are myriad. Blatant sexism, if not outright misogyny, for one. Asimov's is a man's universe. Men do all the thinking, ruling and leading. Group addresses uniformly begin with “Gentlemen . . .” Women are non-existent or ornamental at best. Despite his ability to forecast the growth and change in technology tens of thousands of years into the future, Asimov seems incapable of imagining any change in ca. 1941 gender roles. Then there's his weird obsession with age, and his belief that 50 is old age (full disclosure: I'm 56 and only just got my first senior's discount card at the local pharmacy). The dialog is just plain weird, with a stilted, formal, expository and very British style (correction: a young American man's misapprehension of British style). Granted Asimov was a teenager when he started writing, and barely 21 when he started on Foundation, but still. The characters don't talk: they Elocute, Declaim, Pronounce, and Inveigh.

And the repetition. I get that the novel began life as a series of stories, but once they were collected into a novel someone somewhere should have sat down with a blue pencil and deleted the almost continuous restatements of the key plot points. After the fifteenth time being told “psychohistory was the creation of Hari Seldon who . . . “ I wanted to throw the book against the wall (which, as it's a Kindle, would have been a Very Bad Idea).

There are some logical issues as well. The size of the empire strains credibility. Asimov posits that in the roughly 12,000 years of the galactic empire, humanity has grown to quadrillions of humans on millions of worlds. This is too fast a growth rate. Consider that on earth at the time Asimov wrote this, there were approximately 3 billion people after more than 150,000 year of human growth. Wars, plagues, disasters and other factors kept the population growth rate relatively low for all but the last 100 years or so. How are we to believe that population expansion on other worlds wouldn't have similarly been constrained? For that matter how are we to believe that that many habitable planets could be discovered, let alone settled (and terraformed) in sufficient numbers to sustain such growth?

And where are the alien species? A pan-galactic empire spanning millions of planets and not a single non-terran life form? No exotic animals? No sentient beings? Not even a plant? In later novels Asimov goes to great lengths to hand-wave this problem away, but those were 40 years in his future. Maybe, despite his misogyny and imperialism, Asimov wasn't a colonialist.

I like very much the idea of psychohistory and the idea that it is possible to predict the economic, political and sociological trends of human behaviour. To some extent, that has come true and we are able to forecast somewhat based on mathematical trends. I also like the emphasis on non-violent means to solve political crises, a stance that I'm sure was influenced by the world war that was raging while Asimov was writing the book. Many have commented (some complained) that all the action takes place offstage with most of the book being consumed with conferences, meetings, discussions, assemblies and conclaves. Asimov himself said that upon rereading the book in the 80's he kept waiting for something to happen. But I think I can forgive that as, really, most problems that we encounter in our lives are settled non-violently through talk and careful thought. Yeah, there are some space wars, and there is loss of life on an appalling scale, but to my mind it was the right approach to focus on solving (and resolving) the crises rather than the disasters the crises caused. Smarts and wisdom will take us farther than guns and ammunition.

So who should read this book? And why? Anyone with a desire to understand the history of science fiction for sure if only to hear the echoes of later works (the Ringworld series, the Star Wars cycle, The Co-Dominium Universe). Suckers for the triumph of the cerebral over the physical will also be rewarded, as well as those who reject the western-frontier-in-space trope of many works of SF. But don't go into it expecting grand insights or even commentary about the contemporary world. Asimov's vision, unlike many SF writers, was squarely backward looking which is odd given what was going on in the world when he was writing it. Maybe that's the point: by averting his gaze he could pretend, for a while, that he wasn't living in a dystopian world of violence, corruption and wholesale slaughter. Maybe he wanted to imagine a world where reason, logic, and intelligence could rule.