I have loved Ken Follett ever since I stumbled on ‘Pillars of the Earth’ while wandering through the Montreal central library after two days of a brutal Bar exam. He’s fairly formulaic but I thought this was part of his charm, until I read ‘The Armour of Light’.
It just felt like everything was a gross caricature of his signature style: the main antagonist was cartoonishly villainous for no reason, the romantic relationships just happened without rhyme or reason (or depth!), the social changes were…emotionless? I don’t know how to describe what was lacking. Compared to the Fall of the Giants cycle, where you did get genuinely engaged with the labour struggles of the working class characters, everything just felt trite in this book.
I think I’m just going to pretend that only the two first books of that series exist now.
Anyone else feeling let down by this one?
I don‘t think that there can be a 6th Kingsbrige book anyway. There‘s always around 200 years between the books and unless Ken Follett wants to add another prequel, a 6th book would take place in late 20th century/early 21st century.
That would border heavily on the Century Trilogy. Where the first 2 books were good. The third? Absolute garbage.