Indeed, there is a soap operettish quality to virtually all of the fictional vignettes sprinkled throughout Sarum. While Rutherfurd has attempted to produce a work on the James Michener model, the stronger influences would appear to be out of the Harold Robbins-Jacqueline Susann genre (' was like a wild animal.

Sarum doesn't fare appreciably better as fiction. Rutherfurd's cavalcade approach, with some exceptions, reduces the sweep of English history to something akin to 'NBC News Update' - World War I, for example, makes a cameo appearance - and it also makes for some interesting transitions ('Approximately three thousand five hundred years passed. Pre-historic hunters, the builders of Stonehenge, Romans and Vikings race across the pages, followed by the Black Death, the Reformation, Cromwell and the Civil War, Clive, Nelson and Empire, and concluding with a heliborne royal visit by Prince Charles to Salisbury Cathedral in 1985. In this, his first novel, Edward Rutherfurd has sought to cram 100 centuries into less than 900 pages. GRANDLY subtitled 'The Novel of England,' Sarum (the ancient name for Salisbury) is a condensed history of England from the Ice Age to the present, recounted through events in that city and the lives of five fictional families. SARUM: The Novel of England By Edward Rutherfurd Crown.

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