I came to the same conclusion after reading it. After 900 long pages of story Follet has to wrap everything up in 100 pages and does it pretty poorly. I thought the characters got predictable and the villans were very stereotypical as well. A lot of people love this book and I did manage to finish it which is a rarity for me if a book is over 400 pages.
If you haven't read them 'I, Claudius' and 'Claudius, The God' is about as good as historical fiction gets. (Mentioned in the
Rome History thread as well)