Ken and able

A fire glows. Ken Follet emerges on Zoom from his study. This is where he sits every day to spin stories that are lapped up by millions across the world. On his shelf is a dictionary as thick as the span of his hands. It has been a landmark year for him. His new book ‘Circle of Days’ is out. He has celebrated 40 years of being married. “Still in love,” he says with a smile. He has begun a new relationship with Hachette. He walked out of Pan Macmillan, where he had been for 35 years, recently. At close to 80, Ken is still prolific — still read, wanted, worth being poached after 50 years in the business.

‘Circle of Days’ is set before the written word came into being — Neolithic times and the building of the Stonehenge. There is drama, violence, love, and too many steamy scenes for comfort. But there is also what Ken is known for — good bones of a story wrapped in sort of a reach-for-the-next-wafer-out-of-the-bag addiction. “I think some things people have in common in every age of history,” he says. “They worry about the family, the children. Are we going to be able to feed our children? Does my wife love me? Does my husband love me?”

This is an ambitious tale about one of the most mysterious monuments in Britain. The Stonehenge always fascinated him. For a man who is not a believer, Ken has written extensively about monuments built by faith. (He grew up in a house where worship was important. He was allowed no movies. There was no television. He spent his time in the public library. Or reading the Bible).

If he made his mark with ‘The Eye of the Needle’, a thriller set in World War II, ‘The Pillars of the Earth’ trilogy transformed his career. He went from being a writer of thrillers and espionage to the sweeping world of historical fiction.

Till then, Ken had been very much like the thriller writers of his generation — men who had written themselves out of a financial spot. Jeffrey Archer was staring at bankruptcy when he wrote ‘Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less’; Frederick Forsyth was unemployed when ‘The Jackal’ made his career and Ken needed 200 pounds to repair his car when he wrote ‘The Eye of the Needle’. He finished it in record time. The book sold for millions, making Ken a bestselling writer who loved champagne and now could truly become a connoisseur.

It was his 10th book — and one he wrote under his own name. (He was churning out more than a book a year and couldn’t publish more than one under his real name — so he had three pseudonyms).

Unlike his thrillers, ‘The Pillars of the Earth’ took time. Set in the fictional town of Knightsbridge, it centres around the building of a medieval cathedral — something that Ken became quite obsessed with. So much so that when Notre Dame in Paris caught fire in 2020, television channels turned to Ken to explain how a stone building can burn. It would have started in the roof, deduced Ken — and tweeted it, making it viral and him, and tying him up with cathedrals immediately.

“In the Middle Ages, it was very important to the builders of the cathedrals that they were building it for God,” he said. On the roof of the Peterborough Cathedral, once he noticed that some of the pinnacles — usually very decorated and carved — had been replaced by plain ones. “Obviously, in the 1950s, people [thought] it doesn’t matter. These things don’t need to be decorated, because you can’t even see them from the ground. They put a cheap substitute. In the Middle Ages, they never did that, because God could see it.”

This power — the kind that actually moves mountains — is what Ken tried to recreate in ‘The Circle of Days’. Stones that can move by the sheer strength of men. The wheel had not been invented. There is Seft, who figures out how to move giant rocks; the sister of his wife Joia, the young priestess, the leader who gets people inspired enough to want to be superhuman and drag them. It is an age that needs hope as the drought pushes the woodlanders, farmers and herders all dependent on the land against each other.

“It was obvious to me from the start that there were two essential characters, one a man and one a woman,” he says. “It takes hundreds of human beings to move a giant stone. This is a social movement, and it needs a leader. Joia is this character, who has charisma.”

They were up against more than nature. There is Troon, the leader of the farmers who everyone was afraid of — aggressive, controlling and evil. If herders were controlled by women, farmers were ruled by men. “Cowards,” as Troon refers to them.

This is one of the many strands that Ken tries to weave into a book that is over 600 pages long. There is no romance between them. Too much a cliche for his plot, he believes. But there are love stories, an ingredient Ken believes in — formulaic as it may be. “There’s always at least one love story in my books, and often more than one,” he says.

Does this still work? In a world that is so technologically driven, writing about a period where people wore leather, used flint to kill and did not have a wheel? Judging by the figures, 198 million copies across the world, a brand new contract with Hachette and a fresh book to hit the stands next year — it doesn’t matter. Ken Follet sells.

— The writer is a literary critic