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The creation of Stonehenge will invade your imagination. Christianity comes and the Salisbury Cathedral is a result. Lives and loves of men and women with their triumphs and disappointments evolve against the parade of ages -- kings and their wars and kingdoms, plagues, revolutions, until we get to Queen Victoria and an age that developed faster than ever. The reader gets the impression of a snowball rolling downhill -- time begins with few people and slower development but one bit of progress inspires 30 more and on it goes, bigger and faster ad infinitum.
Rutherford's research is thorough but it doesn't impede his story. With narrative under strict control, his style is clear, descriptive and tight. Relationships wax and wane through the generations as families grow and change with the times.
Rutherford has said about this book that he admires James Michener and deliberately set out to accomplish for England what Michener did for Hawaii, Texas and others. I think he did it better.
Some parts of the book are easy reads, and some aren't. The best parts are the parts dealing with stone age England, the Black Death era, Roman era England, and the times around the American Revolution. Some of the intervals in between the foregoing get pretty bogged down, and are tough sledding. But this is a book that is worth reading, worth finishing, and worth reading again.
Oddly, the book largely ignores the Napoleonic War era, one of Britain's most heroic times. It also does not dwell much on the British Empire at its height. It spends more time on histories of old English cathedrals than most of us care about. But what the heck, with a subject as ambitious as this one, criticism is inevitable.
This book will not disappoint, but it does require effort.
Edward Rutherford begins his tale in a time, before recorded time, as the last ice age retreated from northern Europe and severed Britain from the rest of the continent. Rooting two fictional family trees in characters from this era, he then takes broad strides through the history of Sarum, an ancient name for the area in and around modern Salisbury, England; right up through World War 2 and into the 1980's. Routinely rooting additional fictional families in characters, which arrive over the progression of ages, Rutherford floats a very human dramatic narrative of individuals, families, personalities and geneology on the real timeline, currents and subtleties of the true history of a fascinating region, country and people.
While focusing on a relatively compact region of England, this book offers some deep insight into the very unique, historically multi-cultural and yet, deeply reserved people that are the English. The history in this book is rich, while not overwhelmingly scholarly. Rutherford picks and chooses his timing, sometimes becoming quite detailed in his descriptions of technological advances or historic upheavals which may have changed the course of human development, and relaxing at other times to nearly "romance-novel" treatments of passionate relationships amonst his fictional characters. He uses mysterious Stonehenge and the beautiful 13th-century cathedral at Salisbury as lasting monuments to the character of a people who force tradition and a resolute slowness to change, at every turn; despite their being invaded and fundamentally changed repeatedly throughout their history.
Enjoy this book. Don't try to make too much out of it. Enjoy the light fiction and learn from the history given; this is a large book, and one without the other would've been too much.
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