The Evening and the Morning

By Ken Follett, Viking, 2020, 913 pages
Reviewed by Janet Cleaveland, Dec. 6, 2020

In Ken Follett’s world, evil and misery seem to hold the winning cards, despite the good people who endure cruel setbacks and never give up the fight against their tormentors.

If you saw “Eye of the Needle,” the 1981 film based on Follett’s first major success as a novelist, you’ll know what I mean. For most of the film, a ruthless German spy (Donald Sutherland) has the upper hand against an English woman (Kate Nelligan) who must protect her child and thwart the agent from getting information about D-Day to the Germans.

At the end, a U-boat lurks off the English coast, just out of reach for the dying spy. The Allies and their mission are safe.

Follett’s latest book, “The Evening and the Morning,” follows that pattern of good finally triumphing over evil. One hundred pages from the end, I am still in despair as one of the protagonists says, “The evil men always seemed to get their way, [Ragna] thought. Dreng, Degbert. Wigelm, Wynstan. Perhaps it would always be so, on this earth.”

Hopeless? It looks that way.

A prequel to Follett’s Kingsbridge series about life in medieval England, “The Evening and the Morning” explores the Middle Ages, specifically from 997 to 1006.

I’ve long been a fan of long, sweeping family sagas, and “Evening” fits that genre. The Kingsbridge series includes “The Pillars of the Earth,” “World Without End” and “A Column of Fire” — all 1,000-page tomes of heartbreak, unspeakable cruelty and, at last, redemption and even pay back.

The forces that line up in “Evening” are unambiguous: There’s Ragna, a Norman noblewoman who marries for love and settles in Southwest England only to be betrayed by her husband and his scheming, unprincipled family; Aldred, a monk who dreams of founding a center for literature and learning; and Edgar, the brilliant commoner who becomes a master builder, learns to read and eventually marries Ragna.

All suffer, however, at the hands of the nobility and especially from the wrath of the powerful, clever and brutal Bishop Wynstan, who will do anything to become archbishop of Canterbury.

And if betrayals and personal struggles aren’t enough, the villagers, nobility and clergy have to deal with devastating Viking raids. All around, it is a brutal, unforgiving world for everyone.

But ultimately, it is a world of human triumph.