** spoiler alert ** 8000 years of English history centred around the city of Salisbury told in 1033 pages, propelled through the generational saga of 5 families whose fortunes rise, fall and frequently commingle with one another through the centuries.

You know, settling into a doorstopper like Sarum, that you're in for the long haul, and in my case, almost a month and a half.
As a Cliff Notes to English history, it's actually pretty good for a novel, but as an epic saga you can get get swept up in, it's far too patchy, lacking both the grandiose sweep of James Clavell's Shogun or even the soap-operatic pulp of it's closest forebear, Ken Follet's super-trashy but compulsively readable The Pillars Of The Earth.

The problem is quite simply,time.

Rutherford's epic spans from Antiquity to the 20th Century and the need to propel you through the countless decades means adjacent chapters are often separated by up to 2 centuries in timeline. Human mortality simply cannot withstand such savage time-hopping , and so characters can't and don't last long enough to make an impact.

Each chapter functions as a stand-alone novella, the link between them the burgeoning town of Sarum/Sorviodunum/Old Sarum/New Sarum/Salisbury and the 5 key families around whom all chapters are centred around.

The nice concept (though far-fetched) that Rutherford employs here is common traits; physical, mental and psychological that subsequent generations of a family share and I enjoyed the rise and fall in fortunes of the various clans through the ages.

The horrible Bubonic Plague of the Middle Ages actually marks the turning of fortunes for many families, with the peasant-class Wilsons using their rapacious cunning to rapidly accrue wealth and rise up the social ladder even while the aristocratic Shockleys and Godfreys (the former of Anglo-Saxon stock and the latter descended from Norman knights) see their own dwindling.

The Masons, gifted sculptors and stoneworkers, responsible, in this novel at least, for the building of both Stonehenge and the Salisbury cathedral, nevertheless have atrocious luck in the romance department. It would seem that the Mason men are generationally doomed to be cuckolded, cheated, betrayed,humiliated, sacrificed and rejected by women.

One proming kernel of an idea that would have given this novel some much needed spark is left to go to seed; the vicious feuding between the cold, vindictive and savagely cunning Wilsons and the proud, fearless but naive Shockleys is unfortunately abandoned by Rutherfurd as he leaves the Middle Ages behind, which also mark a noticeable decline in narrative energy , as chapters start reading more like dry historical facts rather than engaging narratives, strange given the increasing abundance of information available from the 16th century onwards.

By the time Ruthefurd gets to the 20th century ,the book has lost much of the vibrancy of the earlier chapters,limping it's way through a series of stodgy, episodic and rushed narratives (the 2 great wars of the century barely cover 5 pages), and concludes most surprisingly on an anti-climactic note. After Stonehenge, the Roman/Saxon/Norman conquests,the Middle Ages, The Protestant Reformation, The Industrial Age and 2 World Wars, Rutherfurd ends his epic tale of Salisbury....with a car break-in.

Perhaps he just got tired.

I know the feeling.