Taylor Caldwell's "The Earth Is the Lord's" … reminds one less of a novel than it does of a particularly grandiloquent opera. All the characters talk in a kind of recitative, the psychology is always grand to the point of inflation, and all the action seems to be accompanied by full orchestra, with percussion instruments dominating. The net effect, too, is operatic, for you feel that while all this blood and thunder verges on the silly, it never really is silly but, on the contrary, is perversely, if only momentarily, fascinating.

Those who remember Taylor Caldwell's munitions melodramas, "Dynasty of Death" and "The Eagles Gather"—her taste in titles runs to the garish—will recall her penchant for the colossally evil, for the tyrannosaurs of the human species. In Temujin she has an unbeatable subject, for this Mongol barbarian, born with a clot of dried blood in his tiny hand, was a perfect beyond-good-and-evil type—in other and less romantic words, a conscienceless killer whose extraordinary abilities enabled him to commit his murders wholesale. Such types bob up every few centuries, and it is damning evidence of human stupidity that we do not recognize them until it is too late.

Taylor Caldwell's story carries Temujin to only one of the summits of his career. When her book ends, he is ready to begin his conquest of southern and central China but has not yet done so. Her main interest lies in Temujin's relations with his wife, his mother, his beloved mistress, and his brothers, as well as in the manner by which he forcibly confederated the Mongol tribes of the steppes and began to elaborate his vision of a universal slave empire. Now, for all I know, the author's melodramatic reconstruction of the character of Temujin may be accurate, or it may be a smooth piece of fakery. There's no way of telling, Mongol memoirs not being very numerous. All you can say with any certainty is that she has fashioned a vigorous yarn, full of seductions, assassinations, lurid visions, tortures, mass murders, battles, ambushes, and high-flown speeches.

From this you derive considerable entertainment of a high-grade penny-dreadful variety. Of the historical significance of Temujin you learn precisely nothing….

If you say that the author is writing fiction, not history, I can only reply that to my mind she is not even writing fiction but, rather, that what she is producing is non-musical opera. And, of its sort, pretty good. (p. 58)