For the past week I’ve been lugging around the three pound tome that is Ken Follett’s final installment to the Century Trilogy, Edge of Eternity. (The first two were Fall of Giants and Winter of the World.) Follett has attempted an enormous undertaking. Using wars as his focal point, he has explained a century of world history in only three novels: World War I, World War II and the Cold War.Perhaps because the material was the most new to me, I think the book focusing on World War I was his most successful with each subsequent book being a little less so. That said, Follett has been writing historical fiction for a long time and the way he combines all of the knowledge he’s accrued is pretty amazing.
Follett’s approach with this series is to take a large cast of characters and illustrate world history through their experiences. Each subsequent time period is told via the next generation of the original cast. This works because the characters are in such close proximity to world events. In Edge of Eternity, one woman has an affair with President Kennedy, a man is an aid to President Nixon, one woman uses her job as a journalist in Russia to feed information to her brother, a high-ranking government official, and so on.
Remember how in the movie Forrest Gump the title character finds himself at many key points in history? That’s basically what happens here. And while I wish I had never thought of that comparison, because it cheapens the book and work that went into it, I think it’s pretty accurate.
Why Forrest Gumping History Works
Although I’ve read about all of the historical events discussed in Edge of Eternity, I couldnt even attempt to relay the information to someone else. It’s not an area of strength for me. By creating fictional characters that I care about and incorporating those characters into history, I become more invested. I still might not remember every detail, but I’m more likely to remember the general gist of what happened.
History, especially political history, is a funny thing because nothing happens in a vacuum. All of the pieces are related to each other but that can be hard to explain. In the context of a story that’s removed from the boring lectures we might have gotten in school, it’s easier to note how story lines interconnect, or how actions cause reactions and history forms over time through many, many series of events.
What You Lose When You Add Too Much Fiction to History
Very few among us is wholly good or wholly bad. But when you’re trying to convey 60 years of history in one novel, you almost have to reduce people to narrow categorization. And so, in Edge of Eternity the bad guys are bad and the good guys are good. Unless they are a main character, in which case people are more nuanced. That’s simply not the fairest telling of history but certainly makes relaying information easier.
One storyline Edge of Eternity I was particularly intrigued by involved Maria Summers and an affair she had with JFK. Follett researched this area by looking to Mimi Alford, whose 2011 memoir talked about her time as an intern in the White House, where she became a presidential mistress. While it might be based on fact, it’s up to me as a reader to look at that plot point, step back and try to examine it as an example of a larger pattern. If I read it as history, and not historical fiction, then I am doing myself a disservice.
I’ve read many critiques of Follett’s portrayal of the latter part of the cold war as being revisionist history. Most of the criticisms seem to come from republicans or conservatives who are offended in his treatment of Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. I think the complaints are well-founded. But. Almost any telling of history is revisionist to some point. Even the best journalists and historians out there make choices about what parts of history they report. The information presented, or not, shapes peoples opinions. Follett made choices and, in doing so, reduced some really complex parts of history into manageable events. I don’t take issue with that because it’s historical fiction. If I were reading a school textbook, I might feel differently.
