The Great Dreamer - Tom Builder and Why he ranks high as one of Fiction's Greatest Leads: The Greatest History Fiction of England: Pillars of the Earth
I love this book
The Shape of the Story
“IN A BROAD VALLEY, at the foot of a sloping hillside, beside a clear bubbling stream, Tom was building a house.
The walls were already three feet high and rising fast. The two masons Tom had engaged were working steadily in the sunshine, their trowels going scrape, slap and then tap, tap while their labourer sweated under the weight of the big stone blocks. Tom’s son Alfred was mixing mortar, counting aloud as he scooped sand onto a board. There was also a carpenter, working at the bench beside Tom, carefully shaping a length of beech wood with an adz.”
This is how Pillars of the Earth starts.
A grand narrative about the building of a Cathedral and the struggle that goes into it. This novel was unlike any other in the 1980s. It was crisp, well told and though Follett’s prose isn’t the best as his counter-point lacks that deft touch that Tolkien, Twain or any of the other pre-1960 authors had, there was still something there. There was a purpose, a love for the story and a passion for the subject matter and a knowledge that made his book a must read.
I can honestly say that the novel changed my life.
I first read it in English, then in French. I preferred the French translation, but for the sake of you dear readers, I’ll go it in English and offer my thoughts on this book in this language before doing so in my secondary French newsletter.
The story is one that has earned its status. It might just be the best novel of the 80s, now onto the actin in this scene.
Tom is building a large home for William Hamleigh, a Norman of mixed descent as he can as we shall soon see in the novel able to speak the Anglo-Saxon tongue of the peasants. I know that this was not the intention of Ken Follett however, because of the fact that he decided not to delve into the bilingual nature of William he inadvertently made him smarter than he ought to have been.
The manner in which Tom is building the house though is quite important to the story as he has engaged two masons to assist him. These two men are are working with the great stones that will be used to set up the walls of the house.
Alfred was for his part mixing mortar which is a fascinating thing to do (I’ve done that and been shown how as a younger man, it was fun and something of a passion of my mother’s who was eager to share it with me). As to the carpenter he’s using an adz which is a carving tool from that era.
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“Alfred was fourteen years old, and tall like Tom. Tom was a head higher than most men, and Alfred was only a couple of inches less, and still growing. They looked alike, too: both had light-brown hair and greenish eyes with brown flecks. People said they were a handsome pair. The main difference between them was that Tom had a curly brown beard, whereas Alfred had only a fine blond fluff. The hair on Alfred’s head had been that colour once, Tom remembered fondly. Now that Alfred was becoming a man, Tom wished he would take a more intelligent interest in his work, for he had a lot to learn if he was to be a mason like his father; but so far Alfred remained bored and baffled by the principles of building.”
This is a detail that must be commented upon; Alfred is portrayed as an imbecile throughout the book which makes no sense. The reason it doesn’t work is that he’s the son of a genius mason and can barely build on even half the level of his father. This man would have been steeped in the techniques of a mason, in their way of life and in the discipline of that way of life.
It might be that there should have been an extra ‘son of Tom the Builder’ one who loves his father and seeks to be as good as Tom in the craft of building monuments and houses. There were many wasted opportunities with these characters (and must confess that Chute d’Innocence’s Henri was inspired by Alfred and Philip the Monk which might be of interest to
and ).“When the house was finished it would be the most luxurious home for miles around. The ground floor would be a spacious undercroft, for storage, with a curved vault for a ceiling, so that it would not catch fire. The hall, where people actually lived, would be above, reached by an outside staircase, its height making it hard to attack and easy to defend. Against the hall wall there would be a chimney, to take away the smoke of the fire. This was a radical innovation: Tom had only ever seen one house with a chimney, but it had struck him as such a good idea that he was determined to copy it. At one end of the house, over the hall, there would be a small bedroom, for that was what earls’ daughters demanded nowadays—they were too fine to sleep in the hall with the men and the serving wenches and the hunting dogs. The kitchen would be a separate building, for every kitchen caught fire sooner or later, and there was nothing for it but to build them far away from everything else and put up with lukewarm food.”
This here is an interesting passage in which we see the invention of the chimney and the use of an undercroft with a curved vault. There’s the hall of course, and you have also the small bedroom, and the kitchen.
All these details guarantee a comfortable 12th century house in which a man of William’s standing could live and live well. The picture that it reminds me of would have to be the below one (to an extent).
“Tom was making the doorway of the house. The doorposts would be rounded to look like columns—a touch of distinction for the noble newly weds who were to live here. With his eye on the shaped wooden template he was using as a guide, Tom set his iron chisel obliquely against the stone and tapped it gently with the big wooden hammer. A small shower of fragments fell away from the surface, leaving the shape a little rounder. He did it again. Smooth enough for a cathedral.”
The act of making a door is important, with Tom setting to work chiselling it out and is forming and shaping with a careful eye for how a door should be.
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A Dreamer who Could give Weight to his Dreams…
Now we see here an aspect of Tom’s character that we’ve not fully seen hitherto now; the dreamer in him. The dreamer aspect of the man is important as it will define him throughout the story.
And here we get to something about him that is important, and I think relates to something that
and even I think has talked about in some of his essays. The former has discussed the traditional theological notion of the ‘Freedom of Function as True Freedom’ what this means is that an artist must be permitted to be free to do art, the sculptor to sculpt and so on as they please. The train-maker must in short be allowed liberty to work freely that he might make the best possible train.The trouble is that we’ve confused liberty of the flesh with freedom of function. Two diametrically opposite forces and ideas.
The latter man has discussed the notion that we create beauty as a kind of ‘offering to God’ in a number of his essays. Both men are quite right, and make some great points so that we can observe in Tom Builder something that was once common in the 80s.
What’s that, I hear you say; well a dreamer. Most authors after the 80s ceased writing the ‘Dreamer’ as a positive thing and ceased writing them, and the journey they must undertake to accomplish their dreams. The Dreamer is either utterly unreasonable in modern fiction or otherwise they have weird dreams like having weird sex or something, or the female character has the totally predictable nonsensical dream of beating up men.
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The reason for which this is nonsense is who cares? No seriously why would I care if she wants to be a knight when I’ve seen that a million times? What’s even more interesting is to see a man aspire to be a knight at this point as it’s more original. Also what of the man who longs to simply build a a Cathedral like Tom Builder?
It is very fascinating that this should be what Tom wishes for, and it falls into something that Nathan,
’s good friend remarked upon, and that has discussed in some capacity (maybe not in these words though) on how there’s two sorts of desires that permeate most Euro-men. It is something that Tolkien discussed.And while all Europeans are different from each other, with Slavs being different from Scandinavians, who are different from Germans, French and so on, there are some minor similarities. One of which is how we are caught between wanting to either be conquerors or gardeners.
This fierce desire to humbly build a nest, build a place that they might call home is something that is almost coded into our language, dna and what have you. It is an important piece of who and what we are. We are not the ‘scum’ that some in the media would make us ought to be (as I’ve hammered for some time, and as
has also written at some length about).Men are not monsters, but rather more typically gardeners. See the next passage from the Pillars of the Earth;
“He had worked on a cathedral once—Exeter. At first he had treated it like any other job. He had been angry and resentful when the master builder had warned him that his work was not quite up to standard: he knew himself to be rather more careful than the average mason. But then he realized that the walls of a cathedral had to be not just good, but perfect. This was because the cathedral was for God, and also because the building was so big that the slightest lean in the walls, the merest variation from the absolutely true and level, could weaken the structure fatally. Tom’s resentment turned to fascination. The combination of a hugely ambitious building with merciless attention to the smallest detail opened Tom’s eyes to the wonder of his craft. He learned from the Exeter master about the importance of proportion, the symbolism of various numbers, and the almost magical formulas for working out the correct width of a wall or the angle of a step in a spiral staircase. Such things captivated him. He was surprised to learn that many masons found them incomprehensible.”
Tom’s singular ambition, his singular desire that he’s dedicated his life to is the construction of a Cathedral. He’s honestly kind of useless at all else in his life, and is only good for building so that he’s the sort of man I imagine might pull the approval of the likes of
& as they’ve discussed many times the importance of devoting yourself to your craft).This is why I think Tom Builder resonated with so many people across the years, as he’s a character who devotes himself to his craft, never retreats from it and has no other purpose in his life. He must build a Cathedral and is only good for that. It is all that he’s ever wanted to do and be. Why should he apologize for that? Why should he retreat from it, or do anything else in his life?
And this should also serve as a lesson to Fantasy authors; not every story or character must be a warrior. In Chute, most of my characters are builders, monks and ladies and also blacksmiths, why? Because I wanted to examine the lives of peasants and of ordinary people caught up in grand adventures and events and how they react to history and great heroes.
Tom is to be caught up in grand events but he never gives up on his dreams. And get this; the guy is in his thirties at the start, and is a man who loses his wife, and must struggle to survive in England’s Anarchy Wars (which as
will tell you, was a pretty damn tough era to survive in for Anglo-Saxons).**********
Also Crown of Blood has a new edition, with maps, character bios and more!
I have it queued up on Audible.. its a long one!
I critique a lot of chapters for others so I automatically look for certain things to comment on. This paragraph stood out to me with things to recommend adjusting. Seven 'was/were' words making it very passive and the last sentence is very long at 49 words. The rest of the writing also has plenty of passivity.
“Alfred was fourteen years old, and tall like Tom. Tom was a head higher than most men, and Alfred was only a couple of inches less, and still growing. They looked alike, too: both had light-brown hair and greenish eyes with brown flecks. People said they were a handsome pair. The main difference between them was that Tom had a curly brown beard, whereas Alfred had only a fine blond fluff. The hair on Alfred’s head had been that colour once, Tom remembered fondly. Now that Alfred was becoming a man, Tom wished he would take a more intelligent interest in his work, for he had a lot to learn if he was to be a mason like his father; but so far Alfred remained bored and baffled by the principles of building.”