Circle of Days
Working from hundreds of hours of eye-witness reports, contemporary documents and interviews with those who helped in its construction, Ken Follett has fashioned a riveting non-fiction narrative about the building of Stonehenge. Every one of its 600 pages vibrates with authenticity. At last we have the true, unvarnished account. Well, okay, no. But what he has done is bring a prehistoric existence to life in a way that doesn’t seem forced or affected. I’ll be the first to admit that the dialogue is wildly anachronistic. But the way the characters speak, while it’s far too 21st century, does make you see them as people. Not waxworks inhabiting a stilted tale of a distant past. Or something as silly as the film One Million Years B.C. , with all its grunts and groans and snazzy fur bikinis. The three tribes living on the plain in Wiltshire - the Woodlanders, the Herders and the Farmers – have recognisably human needs and desires, loves and dislikes and even hatreds. When the le...
