PIllars of the Earth and historical accuracy

[watervole]

 I'm reading 'Pillars of the Earth' by Ken Follet, which is a well-written book, but endlessly frustrating.  (It's a novel, set in the early 12th century about the building of a cathedral)

I'm only a couple of chapters in, but every ten pages or so I'll get thrown out of the book.

When he's talking about architecture, he seems to know his stuff - at least, I haven't caught him in a mistake yet.

However...

Horse Chestnuts are mildly toxic (though you might eat them if desperate), but in any case, they weren't introduced into England until after this period.

Squirrels do not hibernate -and they don't sleep on the ground in any case.

Hops were not used in the brewing of beer until after this period.

Loaf sugar won't be along for another century or so and won't' be made in England until the 1400s.


Writing historical novels is a very tricky art, and probably almost impossible to get right, but I do wish he'd researched a bit more about dates of food.  (this may have been harder in pre-Wikipedia days, but it can't be that hard, because the above all rang bells as I read them)

I'm now puzzling myself as to when/where I picked up trivia on this kind of thing.  I guess part of it comes from a love of museums - I tend to read exhibits in great detail and to do part of a museum in depth rather than skimming all of it.

Also, on a general front:
I've yet to meet a woman who would relish sex outdoors while wearing only a cape with nothing under it in a winter cold enough to have ice on the ground.

If the ground is too hard for ploughing, then it's probably impossible to dig a six-foot deep grave with a wooden spade.

I'm also impressed by any man who delivers a new-baby in a forest in mid-winter and uses his cloth rag to clean its face rather than to wrap it up...  As it's a fictional baby, I strongly suspect it will survive and thrive in spite of being dead for two reasons already in my personal book.

Comments

[emmzzi.livejournal.com]

I have the board game of pillars of the earth which not having read the book (it was a fiver, I gambled) was not much fun. Would you like it?

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I knew there was a reason I avoided this book (apart from the fact I never liked Follett's radio drama for much the same reasons. The man is incapable of thinking logically.)

But then most historical novels and historically based SF and fantasy novels (yes, Connie Willis and Marion Zimmer Bradley, I'm looking at you) can make me hurl them straight at the wastebin.

[wibble-puppy.livejournal.com]

Ha ha ha! I'm with you.

It would be cool to keep a tally of how many times the baby should have died, as the book goes on :D

[davidwake.livejournal.com]

I've written an historical novel set in Ancient Japan, and certain things turn out to be a pig to discover. I wanted to know the boundaries of the various Houses... nowhere, not in any book or Wikipedia or GOogle search I could find. Some things are so ingrained that maybe they just don't cross the mind. The logic going something like: beer is an ancient drink, they drank it in preference to water back in the days of yore, so all I ought to describe the brewing with... (reaches for beer bottle for reference)... hops and barley. (Obviously in Pillars of Earth, not Ancient Japan.)

It's no excuse really: authors have an educational responsiblity.

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

Obviously the readers prefer to be fed and consumme the book without too much thinking. I did hear about the book and I was published here but somehow I didn´t feel like reading it.
In the last years I try to avoid reading/watching frustrating things. I think I began returning to my childhood needs:-)

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I quite enjoyed Pillars of the Earth for the building bits, but the actual plot annoyed me for reasons that (at this distance) I can't quite recall... and I read it before I was doing book logs, so I can't go back and look it up. I think I found the villain too unremittingly villainous - a novelistic version of a pantomime baddie, chewing the scenery and frothing at the mouth. At least - that's the impression that's left in my brain after all these years. I may be misremembering. I would have preferred the story to have been about the building (as in some respects it was) but it was as if Follett didn't trust that his readers would find that interesting enough so he wrapped it up in a semi-conventional historical romance/jealousy/betrayal plot that seemed a bit petty alongside the creation of this great gothic edifice. Man agaist stone would have been more ramrkable than man against man if it had been done right. Don't get me worng I like reading historical romances and scenery chewng villains, I just didn't want it in _this_ book.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Yes please. It's a good game - in fact, it was playing the game that inspired me to read the book!

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Make sure you grab me sometime at Eastercon. I don't think I know what you look like, and I'd love to have a good chat about all sorts of things. I think we have a lot in common.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I must admit that it will only take a couple more errors to make me abandon the book.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

That's it exactly. As soon as it gets into the building bits, I get interested, then I start getting irritated by the rest of the novel.

[sweetheartwhale.livejournal.com]

I did read about two thirds of it then lost the book somewhere in the house. I persisted as I liked some of the more likeable characters but was upset when a main character died - that seemed a plot mistake and a bit of a gratuitous lets shock the reader thing.Also I thought there was too much graphic sexual violence which bordered on the distasteful. As for outside naughtiness in minus several degree only a cloak, no I can't think of a woman born who would stand for that ( I wouldn't and I'm quite broadminded on the outside issue :-) nor would it,surely, be conducive to male performance...

Is the woman in question here some sort of witch? - I seem to recall the book it did pander to the worst kind of male chauvinist idea of witchiness. As Nanny Ogg notes somewhere on the subject of skyclad - real witches generally dont do that because apart from it being bloody freezing outside - there are inconvenient hedgehogs..

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm getting a bit tired of the sexual violence aspect.

I'm 200 pages in, so I'm reluctant to abandon it, but my enthusiasm for continuing is dropping off.

It was Ellen who seems to like sex when any normal person would be frozen to death.

[temeres.livejournal.com]

It's possibly worth bearing in mind that our intolerance for cold has a lot to do with being habitually warm. People who are accustomed to being cold are perhaps more likely to consider doing things in cold conditions that we would never contemplate. Though bonking on ice does seem to be stretching it.

[wibble-puppy.livejournal.com]

I think we do! I shan't be at Eastercon as I'm not a fan (with a capital F) and have never been to a con, despite them sounding fun from alex_holden's accounts. We may be fated to meet some other time, some other where, though :)

[sweetheartwhale.livejournal.com]

Fair point - though, for the past three years, I've lived in a house with the heating turned off to save money and have lived in climates where winter temperatures were regularly lower than -10 and personally I still wouldn't. Not underneath, anyway.... :-)))

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

In the same way that Jack Cohen went through Brian Aldiss's Heliconia series (and many other works by other authors), Follett clearly needs a historical advisor or two.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's part cat.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Not just historical. Today's error is the rate at which timber burns.

A one foot thick heart of oak beam will not burn through in ten mins. In fact, it may not burn through at all - with dense oak, the surface will char and burn a bit, but the wood underneath will sometimes still be usable even after a fire. (the layer of char keeps oxygen from getting easily to the layers below.)

Now pine is a totally different story....

[(Anonymous)]

I for one really enjoyed the book. I actually resisted it a bit because architecture didn't seem like an interesting basis for a fictional story, but as the novel progressed, I began to take more interest in the building issues. I know that the historical inaccuracies are frustrating, but as a lay reader without very much knowledge about medeival times I felt like the book conveyed the mood of the times. Monk politics were surprisingly interesting. The suffering that trickled down to the average person because of political instability was not exactly eye opening, but it's something I hadn't thought about previously. I could go on and on. In general, I feel as if I came away with a better idea of how society operated. Is that precisely the problem?

Regarding the sex in the snow: I've done that! Some people just have the urge to do it anywhere and everywhere. And you have to think that Ellen would have just a bit of pent up energy in that regard.