Having read Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth, I can't help but wonder if it would have been published today. Ever since the rise of Bernard Cornwell's many (and entertaining) books, historical fiction has had a pattern: there is one protagonist. He is a soldier, at least eventually. He wanders through Important Historical Events, killing people, making love to glamorous women, and generally behaving like James Bond with a sword (or musket, or longbow, or sexy sailing ship). Pillars of the Earth has none of these things. Or at least not in the recognised modern format " it's a work of its time (1989), and because of that I found it to be a breath of fresh air. At the end of the day though, I'm not sure freshness is quite enough. Or even very much at all.

The Pillars of the Earth is about the building of a cathedral, or perhaps more accurately it's about the people who build a cathedral, mostly set in a fictional English town in the 12th century. Thrown into this basic premise are side plots involving the civil war between King Stephen and various pretenders, the murder of Thomas Beckett, and a couple of other rather more obscure historical happenings. It covers 50 years and two generations, and is of a commensurate length " well over a 1000 pages of closely typed text.

Unfortunately, it's only the length and scope that makes The Pillars of the Earth an at all memorable read. The prose is workman like in an uninspired way " the sort of thing you'd get in the soft back thrillers you pick up on a whim in an airport departure lounge " which, for all its advantages, never elicits much of an emotional response, or quite lives up the challenge of bringing an older time and people to life. That's a big failing in a book about a medieval cathedral " a physical, artistic presence that really needs to be easy to visualise, but which never is. I got the impression the publishers might agree with me on this one; each of the book's three sections is prefaced by double-page drawing of the cathedral, something which is indeed needed to get a clear idea in your head of what all the book's characters are obsessing about. The lack of a medieval feel' is also a problem that gets obtrusive as the pages pass by " if it weren't for the absence of cars and guns, there'd be nothing to mark the characters as a product of their time. Follet succeeds in placing distinctly medieval problems and pressures on the characters, but never manages to make them think or respond in a medieval way.

Which brings us on to the Follet's next failing, which is a really hit-and-miss approach to characterisation. Sometimes, he hits, most notably with his monastic characters, who manage to blend humanity with religious belief with having to cope with a lifestyle almost entirely devoid of normality in a convincing way. But even these characters break down towards the end of the book (which feels rushed), and far too often Follet resorts to cardboard stereotypes. The evil lord is here, and he has a scheming (and deformed no less!) mother, there's a scheming bishop (he wears black and looks like a spider!), there's the crazy woman with the heart-of-gold who lives in the woods and follows no one's rules, yada yada yada.

But worst of all, Follet doesn't give his world any feeling of authenticity and place. To draw a parallel, Tolkein's Middle Earth is a place that feels real, for all it is very much not. Follet's world on the other hand has no particular identity " which might not be a problem if he was writing a novel set in modern times, but which certainly is when you're trying to represent the past. The sad thing was that for the first few hundred pages, I really thought Follet might do a good job of it. People are dying of starvation, fighting over pigs, struggling with the materialism of the medieval Church and how to reconcile it with spirituality, and generally inhabiting a grubby, lived in world. But it doesn't last, and the book falls into bare narrative, to a greater or lesser extent. Follet's worst moment is a set of chapters describing one character as she travels from England to Spain and back again with her new born baby, searching for the father of the child. There's no sense of travel or motion, no sense of the difficulties of traversing a large continent. The cities of Spain and France feel the same as rural England " indeed, thousands of miles pass in the passage of a paragraph. Her baby is barely an obstruction, money never seems to get in the way, people are friendly. Follet did better at the beginning of his book, when another family with children, travelling only short distances in England, are menaced by disease, starvation, and the threat of banditry. And that's a shame, because a book so focused on a few families and the building of a Cathedral could have done with some sense of scope and grandeur " and for all the length of The Pillars of the Earth, it has neither.

All of this might give you the impression I didn't enjoy the book though, which wouldn't be quite true. I rattled through The Pillars of the Earth at what for me is a fast pace. It's entertaining in its way; the good guys win, the bad guys get their just deserts, there's excitement and all sorts of twists and turns in between " uncomplicated fun. But I couldn't recommend it to someone who doesn't like historical fiction for its own sake " it's a book without much soul, that didn't touch my emotions once. In a few months, I'll have forgotten I ever read it " and as far as I'm concerned that's pretty damning.