Ken Follett
‘Edge of Eternity,’
the final installment in Ken Follett’s sweeping trilogy
“Edge of Eternity,” the latest from best-selling author Ken Follett,
is the final volume in a series of doorstops called “The Century
Trilogy.” As the title implies, these books examine, from a variety of
fictional perspectives, the central events of the 20th century.
The opening installment, “
Fall of Giants”
(2010), established the template for the enterprise, introducing five
families — from England, Wales, Germany, Russia and the United States —
whose private dramas mirrored the turmoil of their respective societies.
The book addressed class struggle, labor relations and women’s suffrage
but found its focus in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and World War I.
In the second volume, “
Winter of the World” (2012), a new generation emerged to confront the Great Depression, World War II and the dawn of the nuclear age. “
Edge of Eternity” opens in 1961, in the early stages of the Cold War.
The
events of the 1960s dominate this huge narrative. (More than 800 of the
book’s nearly 1,100 pages are set between 1961 and ’68.) Mixing
historical figures (Khrushchev, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr.)
with the third generation of his fictional families, Follett
encapsulates the major dramas of the period. These include the rise of
the Berlin Wall, the assassinations of King and the two Kennedys, and
the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Follett offers a particularly
impressive portrait of the civil rights era and of the frustratingly
slow struggle for basic human freedoms. He also makes the familiar story
of the Cuban missile crisis seem suspenseful and fresh, recreating the
event from the Cuban and Soviet perspectives and illuminating the
logistical nightmare involved in secretly transporting nuclear weapons
from the Soviet Union to Cuba.
Follett moves a shade too quickly
through the ’70s and the Watergate scandal. The emotional payoff — both
for the novel and for the series as a whole — comes from Follett’s
account of the ’80s and the gradual collapse of communism, a corrupt
system “helplessly frozen in a terrified conservatism.”
With
great efficiency and a wealth of supporting detail, Follett traces the
impact of Mikhail Gorbachev and his era of reform, illuminating the
forces that destroyed a monolithic institution. The novel ends with one
of the most moving and iconic images of the century: crowds moving
freely back and forth through the Berlin Wall.
“Edge of Eternity” by Ken Follett. (Dutton )
“The
Century Trilogy” covers a large swath of historical territory.
Consequently, it offers a good deal more breadth than depth, a common
failing in this sort of sprawling narrative. Follett may not be a great
literary artist, but he is a commanding storyteller who has taken on an
impossibly large task and accomplished it with passion, intelligence and
skill. Like its predecessors, “Edge of Eternity” is a solid, rigorously
researched work of popular fiction. It’s an honest
entertainment
that brings back vivid, sometimes painful, memories of the not-too-distant past.
Sheehan is the author of “At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub.”
Edge of Eternity
By Ken Follett
