I honestly didn’t know at the beginning who would turn out well and who badly. Baddies and goodies, and the baddies were generally ugly and the goodies pretty (I don’t count Jack Builder as being ugly even though everyone was dumbfounded by his ginger hair, because it totally counted in his favour). I think World Without End was an improvement on Pillars of the Earth. Occasionally the explanations fell clunky on the ear – especially Merthin explaining treadle looms to Madge – but hey, I still know how they work, so it counts as a success.

I learned how to make scarlet dye and how treadle looms work. I like difficult prose, and jewelled sentences, and puzzle-stories, but in World Without End I learned what a coffer dam was and how to build one. The narrative text was unornamented, but the dialogue was full of colour and character.Īnd, sure, I’ll say it – it was nice to have such accessible historical fiction. Importantly, the dialogue was natural and stood on its own. There was no thinking or feeling, things just were, because that’s how the character saw the world. The plainness of the prose worked, because it was a perfect window into each individual viewpoint character. I started casually scheming, which is a high compliment (I don’t often get that into books, though when I read Richard Adams’s Watership Down as a teenager I found myself thinking like a rabbit for about a month). I started wondering what the characters would do in situations I found myself in. I can imagine people finding it hard to get into.īut one day I realised I was really into it. World Without End’s prose is very plain, blunt almost. All I can really say is that the other historical fiction I’ve read is more descriptive, immediately immersive. Certainly not enough to have any kind of context or canon to place the book in. Sansom… I guess maybe other odds and sods? Not enough to do more than draw crude connections between what I have read. One thing I’ve realised since making the effort to write down my thoughts is that I haven’t actually read that much historical fiction. At the beginning, I wasn’t convinced by World Without End, I admit. While I was reading this, I joked far too often that it was Book Without End, hohoho.Ī spoilertastic one – I want to basically just ramble on about this one.

Gwenda world without end