Luke's Reviews > World Without End

An anemic younger sibling to the magnificent Pillars of the Earth. The people and struggles merely rehash what went a few centuries before, but with the injection of the plague and war. Sadly missing was a Philip Prior figure, as every religious figure was simply conniving and corrupt. No-one among all the monks and nuns was genuinely devout, most didn't seem to even believe in God at all: a major step-down from the tense ambivalence between faith and the world in Pillars of the Earth. But the biggest flaw was at the sentence level: the writing was in desperate need of an editor to cut out the pointless exposition that peppers almost every page - we don't need the narrator explaining and re-explaining the characters thoughts, especially when they are perfectly obvious from the dialogue. Nevertheless the characterisation and atmosphere remain masterful and I'll be heading straight to book #3.