Winter of the World - Ken Follett

I've read for more books by Ken Follett than I should really admit to.  The phrase 'guilty pleasure' is thrown around too much and it isn't quite the reason I read them.  The main reason is that sometimes you fancy reading something that will envelop and involve you without challenging you too much.  That, in essence, is what the 'bestseller' or 'blockbuster' novel is about.  Follett produces great doorsteps of novels encompassing a vast legion of characters.  He doesn't always pull it off, but it's a safe bet that he will provide a more satisfactory read than some American airport 'author' who write by the yard.

I read the first of this trilogy 'Fall of Giants' when it came out and thought it definitely fitted into the list of better-class Follett.  It zipped along for its size and although the research into the First World War felt a little shoehorned in, it was a decent read.

Here, we are on shakier ground.  The biggest problem is, of course, the setting. There are so many good,bad or indifferent works of fiction about the Second World War that any new one is almost setting itself up to fail.   Perhaps the sections of the book that work best are the sequences set during the Spanish Civil War and immediately prior to the Japanese attack.

And so, we have with typical Follett panache a palette of characters so vast that recourse to the handy dramatis personnae at the beginning is advised.  People are born, get married and separate, skullduggery is around the corner on every page. Death abounds (as it surely must given the times) and politics, race and religion should meld together with these real events to create a heady stew that excites and enthralls as it entertains.

It should, but somehow doesn't. The young son of the feisty protagonist of the previous book is nowhere near as interesting as his mother, despite being given some of the key experiences. A huge problem with a book like this set in times that we are over familiar with from a variety of media is that we all know that story.  When the action moves to Pearl Harbor, we know what is going to happen.  Once a sequence begins about creating a megabomb (curiously referred to as 'nuclear' rather than 'atomic' which would have been the current terminology?), we know what that is leading to. 

Therefore, the skill in this kind of work is to seamlessly mix the fictional characters into the real events to give them a more raw and emotional impact.  Ken Follett writes well and has managed this with more distant events, with 'Pillars of the Earth' for example.  I don't think this quite held my attention through my interest in the characters in the way it should, which was disappointing.

Back at the start of his career, Follett came up with a much shorter, nastier and better book about the Second World War, 'The Key to Rebecca',  I recommend reading that instead. I will be back for the third installment of this trilogy, but for the reasons mentioned at the beginning of this review rather than any real expectation to be enthralled.