What Is It with Cathedral of the Sea?

I occasionally look at my stats, and I find it interesting to note such things as which reviews are most read and when. I decided to look at them last week because I recently noticed that the novel Cathedral of the Sea had been popping up again as one of the reviews that was most read. I remembered it as a mediocre historical novel, so that piqued my curiosity.

Sure enough, the novel has the third highest number of views of any other on my site. (I’m not counting views of my home page, which has more than 83,000. That page, after all, is whichever review is up for that day.) The one in first place with 983 views is The Devil All the Time, which I don’t really count because it got linked to from Robert Pattinson’s official site after I mentioned the character he was playing and was only looked at for that year and the next. The second place review is for The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu, but views of it peaked from 2017-2019 and fell off to almost nothing from there. Cathedral of the Sea only had a few views for the first few years after I reviewed it, but starting in 2020, it has had an average of 90 views a year, which is a lot for one of my several thousand reviews, and continues to pop up regularly as one of the most viewed posts of the week.

Cathedral of the Sea was published in 2006, but I didn’t review it until 2013. It was a popular book for a while—you can see that it says “#1 International Bestseller” on the cover—but I found it an uninspired and rather poorly told story. I looked back at my review to remind myself what I thought of it, and I observed that the characters were poorly defined and Falcones had a habit of bringing people and things into the story when he needed them and then forgetting them. His women have no personality at all and have horrible fates. The oddest thing about it was that he has a plot where the main character is trying to discard his mistress for years so that he can have good marriage with his long-suffering wife. He finally does, and then there is an immediate jump of five years and within a page or so from that jump, Falcones kills off the wife. The wife is a cipher the entire time, and it’s like he doesn’t know what to do with her once the mistress is gone.

So, I notice that in 2018 Netflix posted a production of it. Could this be the reason people keep looking it up? It’s true that in 2018 the views of my post jumped from almost none to 33 that year and then almost doubled the next year and again the next year. But it has continued to be viewed at about the same rate every year since then. It’s a mystery.

Maybe the Netflix program is better than the book. I guess I have my answer. (I was looking all this stuff up as I was writing this, so I didn’t even know I had an answer until the end of the post. In fact, my plan was to ask my readers if they had a clue about it.) I was unaware of the Netflix series before now. It’s little research expeditions like this that make looking at the stats interesting.

Have you read Cathedral of the Sea or seen the Netflix show? What did you think of it?