So, I was on a walk with my walking group. We're lucky enough to live in a town where there are little free libraries scattered through the parks and neighborhoods.
If you know me, you know I always stop to see what's on offer. And on this walk I saw Winter of the World by Ken Follett, one of his I'd never read. So, of course it came home with me.
Wikipedia identifies Follett as a Welsh novelist working in the genres of "thriller, spy novel, and historical fiction." Years ago I read his Eye of the Needle, a spy novel, and then The Key to Rebecca, also a spy novel but with some historical underpinnings. Neither actually my cup of tea, but both well-written.
Then I read Pillars of the Earth, the first of his Kingsbridge series. And I was hooked. It is set in the 12th Century. Then World without End with descendents of some of the Pillars characters, and then A Colume of Fire set in 1558 through 1605. (After doing a bit of research to write this review I see that I've got a couple more of them to read -- a prequel and the fourth in the Kingsbridge series.)
On closer examination of the book from the Little Library, I discovered that World in Winter is the second in a trilogy.
Of course it is, and I can't read it without having read the first, so, I went online to my local public library and downloaded the first book in the trilogy to my eReader -- The Fall of Giants.
The Fall of Giants follows families from five cultures -- Welsh, English, German, Russian, and American -- actually more if you count the ruling and working classes.These families travel their intersecting paths from pre-World War I, the holdover days of feudal Europe through the struggle for rights for women and the working classes complicated by World War I and the Russian Revolution to what they hoped would be a fairer and freer world without war.
It begins in 1911 in Aberowen, a small, Welsh mining town. Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams, son of a union leader, goes to work down in a coal mine on land owned by the Fitzherberts, an aristocratic English family. Billy and his sister Ethel carry the Welsh common people's arc.
The Earl Fitzherbert and his sister Maud are the main characters in the English arc of the story. He the traditional capitalist/patriarch. She the entitled but modern woman suffragist.
Fitz's friend from school, a proper upper class English school, Walter von Ulrich is a German nobleman, albeit the modern son of a traditionalist father.
Fitz's wife Bea is a Russian princess, by blood and attitude. And the two Peshkov brothers were orphaned by Bea's brutal father.
And Fitz's friend Gus Dewar is a wealthy, well-educated, son of a U.S. Senator. Dewar is a close aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, an American-style upper class, white Southerner. Dewar is the modern American amid a traditionalist family and society.
Follett not only writes easily recognizable characters, he also writes vivid scenes of the times and places. His Lady Maud Fitzherbert gives us the venue of the war-ending Treaty of Versailles.
In The Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles:
"This was one of the most grandiose rooms in the world. It was the size of three
tennis courts in a line. Along one side, seventeen long windows overlooked the
garden; on the opposite wall, the windows were reflected by seventeen mirrored
arches. More important, this was the room where in 1871, at the end of the
Franco-Prussian War, the victorious Germans had crowned their first emperor
and forced the French to sign away Alsace and Lorraine. Now the Germans
were to be humiliated under the same barrel-vaulted ceiling. And no doubt some
among them would be dreaming of the time in the future when they in turn
would take their revenge. The degradation to which you subject others comes
back, sooner or later, to haunt you," Maud thought. "Would that reflection occur
to men on either side at today's ceremony? Probably not."
The Fall of Giants continues a few months after The Treaty of Versailles is signed.
A few months after the peace treaty is signed? In June of 1919 communications were not so difficult as to delay the end of the war. No. Follett gives us the reason. The Russian Revolution. The Allies, especially the European Allies, felt threatened by the Bolsheviks. The English Government secretly, without telling Parliament, sent troops to Russia to aid the White Russians (the Royalists) against the Bolsheviks who were being celebrated in England by working-class Brits.
Follett's characters Billy Willams and his fellow soldiers from Aberowen, Wales, without being told where they were being sent, found themselves delivered by ship to Vladivostok, the major Pacific port in Russia, to fight in the Russian civil war. They were there even after World War I itself was over.
Billy observed, "People took little notice of the Aberowen Pals marching through the town. There were already thousands of soldiers in uniform there. Most were Japanese but there were also Americans and Czechs and others."
(Since reading this, I have not been able to find information about whether or not the United States Congress approved sending U.S. troops to fight in the Russian Civil War.)
This was especially interesting to me. My maternal grandmother's brother and my paternal grandfather's brother-in-law told stories about fighting in Siberia during World
War I. I could never understand why. Now, thanks to Fall of Giants, I do.
Something else I learned (and I did fact check it) from Follett's Fall of Giants through his character Lady Maud Fitzherbert:
"The Mail [a London newspaper owned by Lord Northcliffe] had conducted a hate campaign against the thirty thousand Germans who had been living in Britain at the outbreak of war—most of them longterm residents who thought of [England] as their home. In consequence families had been broken up and thousands of harmless people had spent years in British concentration camps."
"[Northcliffe’s] talent was to express his readers’ most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper," she observed."
It seems The United States did not fall far from its British parent tree.
Follett ends Fall of Giants perfectly. The Earl Fitzherbert meets Ethel, a woman, his former housekeeper from Aberowen, the daughter of a labor union officer at his mine, now a Member of the House of Commons, and her son on the stairs at Parliament.
"Fitz’s expression was thunderous. Reluctantly he stood aside, with his son [and heir, the Viscount Aberowen] and they waited, backs to the wall, as Ethel and Lloyd walked past them and on up the stairs.”
