In Depth
Ken Follett: Return to Kingsbridge
09.08.07 Tom Tivnan
I see Ken Follett coming down the road from my window seat at the Dog and Duck pub in Soho. He is a few minutes late for our interview and is hurrying in a slightly comical half-running, half-walking trot.
Yet when he arrives he doesn't look at all flustered: his white bouffant hairstyle is perfectly coiffed, his elegant suit seems bespoke tailored. He apologises for being late. He has just come from the House of Commons, after watching his wife Barbara, Labour MP for Stevenage and the new minister for equality in Gordon Brown's government, field her first set of ministerial questions. "She did very well," he says, obviously proud. "A bit nervous at first, but really, really well."
That we begin with politics is not surprising. Famous for his massively popular thrillers and historical novels that his publisher Macmillan estimates to have sold about 100 million copies worldwide, Follett may be equally well known for his role in the rise of New Labour. A Labour supporter since just after university, he was a prominent party fundraiser in the 90s, while Barbara was a "Blair Babe" elected in the landslide of 1997.
Things soured in 2000 when Follett had a very public spat with Blair over Follett's disenchantment with the government's spin culture. The couple found themselves cast out into the political wilderness.
If Barbara is now making a return to the Labour fold, Follett is making a kind of literary return himself. His next novel, World Without End (Macmillan, October), is a sequel to his most enduringly popular book, Pillars of the Earth.
Published in 1989, Pillars of the Earth was a departure for Follett, who had established himself with a string of bestselling "low-tech" spy thrillers, beginning with Eye of the Needle in 1978. Set in early medieval England, Pillars of the Earth is a doorstopper, a multi-layered epic centred on the building of a cathedral. He says, "In writing Eye of the Needle, I had in mind Ian Fleming and James Bond. With Pillars of the Earth, I had in mind Gone with the Wind: a very big historical novel in which a series of intense personal dramas are played out against a background of sweeping historical change."
On publication, Pillars of the Earth was not a runaway hit, yet it kept selling steadily, staying on the bestseller list in the UK for over a year. The paperback remains a strong backlist title (it sold almost 12,000 copies through BookScan in the first seven months of 2007), and in 2003 it was voted number 33 on the BBC's Big Read poll of the 100 greatest British books.
In the intervening years, Follett returned to the spy and adventure story and now has brought out World Without End as a result of fan pressure. He says, "At any book event I would do, the second or third question always was, ‘I like all your books, but I like Pillars of the Earth the best,' and the rest of the audience would applaud. And then they would ask me for the sequel."
World Without End is set in the 1300s, 200 years after Pillars of the Earth, and in the same medieval cathedral town of Kingsbridge. Against the backdrop of the Black Death, it focuses on the struggles between the church, merchant classes and nobility. At the centre is the love story between Merthin, a young architect of genius, and the wilful and intelligent Caris. The two are pitted against Godwin, a once pious, now power-mad, abbot.
Thinly disguised Blair
When I say that Godwin seems to have more than a passing resemblance to Tony Blair, (complete with an Alistair Campbell-like right-hand man), Follett's eyes twinkle and he laughs, a rat-a-tat ha-ha-ha. "It's certainly true that my own experiences in politics inform all this," he says. "If the hat fits, put it on him. It's really up to the reader to decide. What I wanted to do with Godwin was to create a character who started out with good intentions and makes bad decisions one by one, and becomes a villain."
Follett was born in Cardiff, moving to London with his family when he was 10 years old. His parents were born-again Christians, and he grew up in a strictly religious household where cinema and television were prohibited. Though his parents' regime chafed, he believes the "no TV" rule helped his future development: "I joined the public library at seven years old and pretty much from that time I was reading two to three books a week. That's obviously part of why I do what I do."
He read philosophy at University College London, before moving into journalism. After discovering it "wasn't my metier", he drifted into publishing, becoming deputy managing director for "long-forgotten" publishers Everest Books, a company set up by Fleet Street journalists to publish books by Fleet Street journalists. "On the face of it, not a bad idea," he says. "We had a lot of smart people there, but the problem was nobody knew anything about publishing."
In his spare time, he began writing. He slogged away, having 11 books published—thrillers, children's titles and movie script novelisations ("hack work done for money")—until he hit it big with Eye of the Needle. He says the books before Eye of the Needle were a learning experience, as was working in publishing. "People would come to me with a proposal or a first draft and I would look at it and say, ‘OK, how am I going to persuade the book trade that they should order a large quantity of this book because people are going to come into shops gasping to buy it?' Then I would go home and look at my own stuff and think, ‘What is it about what I'm writing that will make people gasp to buy this book?'"
At the moment, Follett is "in that pleasant stage of kicking ideas around for the next book". Whatever he decides to do, it is almost certain to end up on the bestseller list. Ultimately, he confesses, what drives him is "my dominant need to entertain people". He adds, "I am always trying to write something that will appeal to millions of people. That's quite fundamental to me, to enchant all those millions of people."
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