Edge of Eternity by Ken Follett

I was thrilled to find a Guardian newspaper summer reading list from all kinds of well known writers. This book was on it and I can imagine some cashed up writers prone on a sun lounge in Malaga reading this book from cover to cover. It is a page turner indeed. I am hypercritical of historical fiction and shy away from bodice rippers. However this one is really very compelling. I loved the historical period in which is was set: 1945 to 1989. It follows the lives of a loosely connected family whose various branches live in the Washington, East Berlin and Russia. It charts all those recently fascinating political events including the presidency of JFK, the lives and deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the nuclear arms race, the Cold War, the Bay of Pigs, the Contras, the civil rights movement in the US; in Russia we live through Kruschev and the succession of other leaders whose names I still can’t spell, right though to Gorbachev; in East Berlin of course we live with the Wall, the Stasi and the relentless dehumanization of the population. It is quite fascinating. What is not so fascinating is Follett’s really irritating prose style and interest in trivial detail. We could have cut at least twenty pages out of this 1004 page book if he’d reined in superfluous descriptions of what people ate for ‘snacks’ (for some reason every time I saw that word I wanted to throw the book at him!) and his tedious blow by blow descriptions of tawdry sexual encounters. I do not want to go with the hero as he slips his hand up under her skirt to find the soft triangular mound of her womanhood, for god’s sake. Follett is playing out his own sexual fantasies here and it doesn’t do service to what is otherwise a good story. And finally a bit of a whinge about the characters. There were too many good news stories here, too many easy paths to rock and film stardom, hell even potential Nobel prizes. We skimmed over whole lives, went in and out of marriages, babies grew up and left school, all in a superfluous and quite unsatisfying manner. I guess I found the premise so interesting that I thought someone could have written an entirely different type of book that explored some of these people’s situations in depth. But then, this is historical fiction, and that’s all part of the genre I guess. If you’re going to read it, warts and all, then this a good one.