Let’s get one thing straight: Weapons of Light is announced as the final work in the Kingsbridge saga, which Ken Follett began in 1989 with the monumental Pillars of the Earth. Reached at his home in Hertfordshire, the Welsh writer – who, at 74, has been writing for half a century – added: “I didn’t swear that I would never write another Kingsbridge story, but I feel like it’s on “It’s time to say it.” End all of that. You can keep going until the audience gets tired of it, but I think it’s better to stop before than after you reach that point. »
At the time of the worldwide release of the fifth volume of the saga, he feels in a very special way that the curtain is falling. Leaving behind a part of his life that lasted almost 35 years and made him one of the most popular and popular novelists (50 million copies sold of the first four volumes of the series). Every journalist who is called upon knows it: rarely does approaching an interview with a writer or reading a novel before its publication elicit so many “I’m jealous!” »
Still.
I haven’t vowed never to write another Kingsbridge story, but I think it’s time to put an end to it. You can keep going until the audience gets tired of it, but I think it’s better to stop before than after you reach that point.
Ken Follett’s publishers expressed doubt when, some time after his (final) success with The Gun in the Eye, the man who had made his name with spy stories wrote: “For people to have the feeling I had, as …” as a child, when I held a new James Bond in my hands”) brought up the idea of tackling a historical novel that deals with the construction of cathedrals.
And initially the very confidential sales of this 1,000-page component proved the skeptics right. Then word of mouth came into play. “We all know that the reader sells a book when he tells his friends about it,” remarks the person who writes neither for critics nor for literary prizes, but for people, in a complicit tone. Who, despite the speed at which our world (and our culture) is changing today, are still willing to spend dozens of hours hunched over a paving stone. “The proof is in my bank account,” he joked in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Return to Kingsbridge
The fact is that Ken Follett had no plans to return to Kingsbridge. However, his readers never tired of asking him for a sequel. “But what’s next?! » he answers, laughing. In fact, some of the protagonists of Pillars of the Earth survived neither the tragedies that befell them nor the passage of time: the story spans 50 years, an eternity in these 1100s. Except the request kept coming back again. After 18 years of hesitation, the writer gave up and accepted the request? Yes and no. “I found a good story that could be set in Kingsbridge. » But it wasn’t a direct sequel (or prequel).
In Dusk and Dawn (2020), he visits Kingsbridge at the end of the 10th century, when the Vikings increased their raids on England. In “A World Without End” (2007), he returns there in the middle of the 13th century, when the great epidemic of the Black Death hits London and, through the bonds, “enables science to free itself from religion.” A Pillar of Fire (2017) takes place two centuries later and trembles under the war of religions.
Each time “possibilities of conflict, injustice, cruelty, possible or impossible love” that he places on the shoulders of ordinary people. “Ordinary people do extraordinary things,” he likes to say. And for this, these ordinary people “defend themselves against the existing system”. They are rebels. And they are the most interesting people to follow and love. After all, it is more difficult to recognize oneself in the king than in the unfortunate worker.
And if a common thread were drawn between these novels – which can be read independently of each other – it would be the color of the pursuit of freedom and speech, “so difficult to achieve and so easy to lose”: the red of blood, but also that of the beating heart.
The same goes for Weapons of Light, for which Ken Follett found his “eureka”! » in the pages of Liberty’s Dawn. A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution, a collection in which historian Emma Griffin has collected hundreds of autobiographical texts written between 1760 and 1900 by workers whose lives were transformed by the Industrial Revolution.
This reading placed the novelist at the start of a new marathon that would last three years: one year of research and two years of writing, as usual.
Two revolutions
Beginning in 1792, Arms of Light culminates in the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 and takes place in the rhythm of two revolutions.
On the one hand, the Industrial Revolution, driven by the introduction of modern spinning machines (the spinning jenny), transformed the lives of Kingsbridge workers who worked in the textile industry. For better or worse. “This revolution has given rise to many conflicts, atrocities and injustices. As the rich became richer, jobs were lost as everything became more expensive due to the Napoleonic Wars. But it also enabled many people to escape poverty,” the author remembers.
On the other hand, the revolution that came from France, the ideas of freedom and the voice of the people, made the English monarchy tremble, fearing to see them crossing the English Channel. The government is therefore fighting them with increasingly repressive measures. Trade union movements are forbidden. The right to assemble is revoked. “There were strikes, riots. Many arrests and convictions often led to exile on the Australian continent from which we did not always return.
That’s history. With a capital H (and a big axe). Weapons of Light tells everything in a different way. “My fiction is somewhere else. “It doesn’t replace history books, but it makes history more concrete and more entertaining,” explains Ken Follett, who makes no secret of the fact that he wants to entertain his readers. To do this, hook them from the start: the opening sentences of his novels are Machiavellian in their effectiveness; and its characters are campy/loved/hated in just a few pages. To achieve this effect, “I focus on what the characters hope for, what they want to achieve, what they are afraid of.” Hopes and fears. All people have always had this in common. Then it becomes easier to identify with someone or to develop compassion for someone, even if they live in a completely different time than ours. And even if they are made of ink and paper.
Even after 50 years of practice, Ken Follett never tires of this magic of words. “I never stop writing,” concludes the man, who has been working on another project since handing the manuscript of Weapons of Light to his publisher at Christmas. Which, we suspect, he can’t/won’t say anything about. See you in three years.
Weapons of Light
Ken Follett, translated from English by Odile Demange, Christel Gaillard-Paris, Valentine Leÿs and Renaud Morin, Robert Laffont, Paris, 2023, 792 pages