Winter of the World

I'm only halfway through the second book in Ken Follett's Century Trilogy, Winter of the World, but I have to pause for a moment to talk about it.  The book was an unexpected Christmas present, and I likely wouldn't have read it had it not been.  The first book in the Century Trilogy, Fall of Giants, was difficult for me to get through.  Like all of Follett's most recent work, it was long (his epics run around 900 to 1000 pages) and complicated on a scale that required frequent flipping to the index to keep the characters straight.  But Fall of Giants, set during World War I, was weighed down by pages of dialogue with fictional characters describing real reasoning for war.  I like Follett's books because of the characters and the endless intricacies of his plots - the political asides here were hard for me to invest in.

Winter of the World, set in World War II, with all the same characters and now their children, so far has given the political backstory a backseat, perhaps because the travesties and political divisions of WWII are still widely known.  Because of that, more attention is on the people the book follows, and the real effect of war on their lives.  I have sunk into it in a way that I haven't since The Pillars of the Earth (the first Follett book I read, and quite possibly the best book I've ever read).

There is a sense of chaos underscoring the world right now.  I can feel it, and I know lots of other people can feel it, too.  That's why it's good to read a book like Winter of the World, where the occupation of Paris gets thrown into a sentence to create the same level of casual shock in us, the readers, as it does in the characters hearing about it.  Of course, we know how it ends - score one for the good guys on this side of history - but they don't.  No one knew back then...and if what we feel is chaos, then what must it have been like not to know whether Hitler would be defeated?  What would it be like today for a city the size and prominence of London to be sieged by an aerial attack every night for a month?  For people to believe so concretely in a war effort that regular citizens left their jobs - had to leave their jobs - in order to help?

No, the chaos of 2014 comes from a much shallower place.  "The reader will probably wish there was a thousand more pages," is the quote chosen for the front cover, attributed to The Huffington Post.  Aside from the shoddy grammar, it seems an odd thing to say when there's another book ahead.  (That is, there are a thousand more pages.  Coming Fall 2014!)  I mean, really.  No wonder someone organizing a takeover of the world seems utterly foreign; nowadays we fail at things as simple as pulling together a marketing quote for a bestselling book.

Winter of the World:  what a perfect phrase.  And yet so unabashedly then.  It was an era of uncertainty...and over here in real time, where it's just "Winter, the Season," it's one I am happy to slip into through the next 500 pages.