Let’s get one thing out of the way right away: Weapons of Light is announced as the final opus in the Kingsbridge saga that Ken Follett began in 1989 with the monumental The pillars of the earth. Reached at his home in Hertfordshire, the Welsh novelist – who, at 74, has been writing for half a century – adds: “I didn’t swear that I would never write a Kingsbridge story again, but I feel that It’s time to put an end to all of this. You can keep doing something 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 therefore experiences, in a very significant way, a feeling of the curtain coming down. To leave behind a part of his life which lasted almost 35 years and made him one of the most popular novelists (50 million copies sold of the first four volumes of the series) and the most loved. Any journalist called to speak to him knows it: rarely does the approach of an interview with a writer or the reading of a novel before its release elicit so many “I’m jealous!” »
Yet.
I haven’t sworn I’ll never write a Kingsbridge story again, but I feel it’s time to put an end to this. You can keep doing something 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 doubts when, some time after (finally) enjoying success with The gun in the eyethe man who had made a name for himself with spy stories (he wrote “so that people would feel that feeling that I had, as a child, when I held a new James Bond in my hands”) brought up the idea to tackle a historical novel which would focus on… the construction of cathedrals.
And, initially, the fairly confidential sales of this brick of more than 1000 pages proved the skeptics right. Then, word of mouth got involved. “Now, we all know that what sells a book is a reader who tells his friends about it,” remarks, in a complicit tone, the one who writes neither for critics nor for literary prizes but for people . Which are, despite the speed at which our world (and our culture) turns today, still ready 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.
Returns to Kingsbridge
The fact remains that Ken Follett had not planned a return to Kingsbridge. His readers, however, never tired of asking him for a sequel. “But what next?! » he replies, laughing. Indeed, several of the protagonists of Pillars of the earth did not survive the tragedies that befell them or the passage of time: the story runs over 50 years, which is to say an eternity in these 1100s. Except that the demand came back again and again. After 18 years of procrastination, the novelist… gave up and accepted the request? Yes and no. “I found a good story to tell that could be set in Kingsbridge. » But it was not a direct sequel (or prelogy).
In Dusk and dawn (2020), he visits Kingsbridge at the end of thee century as the Vikings increased their raids on England. In A world without end (2007), he returned there in the mid-1300s as the great epidemic of the Black Death struck London and, through the gang, “allowed science to free itself from religion”. Camped two centuries later, A pillar of fire (2017) trembles under the war of religions.
Each time, “possibilities of conflict, injustice, cruelty, possible or impossible love” that he places on the shoulders of common people. “Ordinary people doing extraordinary things,” he likes to say. And for this, these common people “stand up against the system in place. 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 unhappy worker.”
And if a common thread were to be drawn between these novels – which can be read independently – it would have the color of the quest for 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 is true in Weapons of Light, for which Ken Follett found his “eureka!” » in the pages of Liberty’s Dawn. A People’s History of the Industrial Revolutiona collection in which historian Emma Griffin has collected hundreds of autobiographical texts written between 1760 and 1900 by workers whose lives were changed by the industrial revolution.
This reading placed the novelist on the starting line of a new marathon which would last three years: one year of research and two of writing, as usual.
Two revolutions
Starting in 1792, Weapons of Light culminated in June 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo and took place at the rhythm of two revolutions.
On the one hand, propelled by the arrival of modern spinning machines (the spinning jenny), the industrial revolution transformed the lives of Kingsbridge workers working in the textile industry. For better and for worse. “This revolution generated a lot of conflict, cruelty and injustice. As rich people got even richer, jobs were lost as, because of the Napoleonic Wars, everything became more expensive. But it also allowed many people to escape poverty,” recalls the author.
On the other side, the revolution coming from France, the ideas of freedom and the voice of the people made the English monarchy tremble, which feared seeing them cross the Channel. The government is therefore fighting them by introducing increasingly repressive measures. Union movements are prohibited. The right to assembly is taken away. “There were strikes, riots. Many arrests and convictions” often resulting in 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 tell it all differently. “My fiction is elsewhere. It does not replace history books, but it makes history more concrete and more entertaining,” explains Ken Follett, who makes no secret of it: he wants to entertain his readers. To do this, hook them from the start: the first 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 are trying to accomplish, what they are afraid of. Hopes and fears. All humans have always had this in common. It then becomes easy to identify with someone or to have empathy for someone, even if they live in a time very different from ours. And even if they are made of ink and paper.
This magic of words, even after 50 years of practice, Ken Follett never tires of it. “I never stop writing,” concludes the man who, since submitting the manuscript of Weapons of Light to his publisher, at Christmas, working on another project. Of which, as we suspect, he cannot/wants to say anything. See you in three years.