'A person who breaks a promise diminishes herself. It’s like losing a finger. It’s worse than being paralysed, which is merely physical. Someone whose promises are worthless has a disabled soul.'
The trilogy describes the three main wars of the twentieth century.
Book 1, Fall of Giants, is about great powers falling: not just empires but also patriarchy; women began to win the vote in the early 20th century. However, WWI and how the collective guilt that led to it was somehow all funneled on to Germany once the war was done dominates the tale. Who knows? Minus the vicious retribution which the victors exacted, there may never have been created the situation which led to WWII.
Book 2, Winter of the World delves into plans for peace, the failure of the League of Nations, the fiasco that was WWII, the compromises made to ensure the survival of a nascent UN, and the many arguments used to support or fight various ideologies.
The thread of the Russian Revolution runs through both books as rebellion to authoritarianism & then as a mess in itself ultimately setting the stage for a divided world described in Book 3, Edge of Eternity, which deals with the Cold War and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union's communist ideal.
Personal relationships in the trilogy are improbably neatly tied up but the books' value perhaps lies in their exploration of the characters' thought processes. What in God's name makes anyone think that they can negotiate with Nazis? What possessed so many young people to volunteer to fight in the Spanish civil war? How did the idealism of the Russian Revolution turn into a seemingly endless willingness to put up with obvious injustice and to fight against other groups loosely allied to its own ideology?
By and large, these are histories we have largely forgotten outside academia but, although the issues of the twentieth century are not quite those of today, it feels as though the answers to the questions they raised could possibly provide some insight into our own behaviours today.