Ken Follett

• Born: June 5, 1949
• Place of Birth: Cardiff, Wales

TYPES OF PLOT: Espionage; historical; thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Apples Carstairs, 1974–75; Piers Roper, 1975–76; Century Trilogy, 2010–14; Kingsbridge, 2020–23

Contribution

Ken Follett writes exciting tales of espionage and adventure in various locales and periods. Thoroughly researched, his novels mix historical facts and colorful protagonists to create intelligent, if not intellectual, entertainment. He also presents complex, believable characters whose personal lives are often as chaotic as their social and political milieus. He has consciously courted bestsellerdom by employing vivid heroines to appeal to female readers. Although his work resembles the tradition of Helen MacInnes and Alistair MacLean more than that of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, Follett’s novels are carefully crafted and generally well-written in a deceptively simple style. Follett writes perhaps the most straightforward plots to follow of all espionage writers since the pinnacle of Ian Fleming—without sacrificing complexity and ambiguity of motive.

Biography

Kenneth Martin Follett was born on June 5, 1949, in Cardiff, Wales, the son of Martin D. Follett and Lavinia C. Evans Follett. His father was an Inland Revenue clerk and later a lecturer at a school for tax inspectors. After growing up in Cardiff, Follett studied philosophy at the University of London. He married Mary Emma Ruth Elson in 1968, and their son, Emanuele, was born later that year. A daughter, Marie-Claire, was born in 1973. Follett’s wife worked as a bookkeeper while he continued his education. After he graduated in 1970, he worked as a reporter and popular music columnist for the South Wales Echo in Cardiff. In 1973, he became a crime reporter for the Evening News in London for a year. Follett’s switch from journalism to fiction resulted from financial necessity. His daughter had just been born, and the family had recently bought a house when Follett’s car broke down. Because a fellow journalist had made some quick money by selling a mystery novel, Follett hurriedly wrote The Big Needle (1974) about drug dealers. The book paid Follett’s car repair bill and encouraged him to continue pursuing fiction.

In 1974, Follett joined the staff of Everest Books, a modest London publisher, to learn the essentials of writing bestsellers. He spent the following years rising to deputy managing director of the firm and writing nine more books—mysteries, thrillers, and children’s mysteries—under his name and a series of pseudonyms, earning about five thousand dollars for each. Follett told the Los Angeles Times that he learned to create good books “by writing mediocre ones and wondering what was wrong with them.” He also attempted to make some of these early efforts at least different from the flood of popular fiction, with industrial spying the subject of The Shakeout (1975) and The Bear Raid (1976).

Follett’s breakthrough came with The Eye of the Needle (1978). The novel, which resulted from an English publisher’s request for an adventure novel related to World War II, was an international success. It sold over ten million copies and won the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America. It established Follett as a novelist. After publishing Triple with Arbor House in 1979, he signed a three-million-dollar deal for three more books with New American Library/William Morrow. He then took his family to a village near Nice, France, where they lived until returning to England in 1982.

During the 1980s, Follett continued to write spy novels but ventured into other fields. The success of the American industrialist H. Ross Perot’s company in rescuing hostages from the Iranian government provided the material for Follett’s On Wings of Eagles (1983), a nonfictional book. In 1989, he published his first historical novel, The Pillars of the Earth, a family saga involving the building of a medieval cathedral. Despite the book’s controversial sexual content, it was judged one of England’s best 100 novels by a British Broadcasting Company poll in 2003. Due to that novel’s success, Follett signed a deal with Dell Publishing Company to write two more books for $12.3 million. However, although Dell was pleased with A Dangerous Fortune (1993), it was less enthusiastic about A Place Called Freedom (1995), a saga set in the United States. Eventually, Crown Publishers negotiated a deal with Dell and published the book, enabling Follett to retain authorial control of his work.

In the 1980s, Follett and his wife divorced. Afterward, Follett married Barbara Broer, a Labour Party member of Parliament for Stevenage, England, where the couple settled.

Follett received many awards in the first decades of the twenty-first century. In 2018, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He also received honorary doctorates from several universities.

Analysis

The Eye of the Needle and Ken Follett’s subsequent spy novels illustrate the fruits of his apprentice period. His fiction is economically written, with few wasted words, scenes, or characters. Follett's books are tightly constructed and remarkably easy to follow compared with the espionage novels of John le Carré, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth, and Robert Ludlum. Yet, Follett displays the intelligence, ambiguities, subtleties, and didacticism associated with the best spy fiction. Despite a quiet socialism that distrusts the rich and powerful and sides with the oppressed and disadvantaged, Follett never lets his concerns get in the way of telling an exciting story.

Follett does not limit himself to specific times and places, unlike most contemporaries. His novels take place in World War II, Britain and Egypt, Israel in the 1960s, England in the days leading up to World War I, and Afghanistan in the early 1980s, with side trips to Germany, Russia, France, and the United States. His protagonists are spies, military men, revolutionaries, prostitutes, and homemakers. He occasionally includes historical personages, such as Sir Winston Churchill and a young Anwar al-Sadat. Unafraid to resort to the unusual, unexpected, or unlikely, Follett, in Triple, has Israeli intelligence enlist the aid of a Mafia don to hijack a shipload of uranium.

Incident and character are the significant elements in Follett’s fiction. Each novel has at least one brilliantly conceived and executed sequence. One of the best and most cinematic action scenes occurs in The Key to Rebecca (1980) when the motorcycle-riding hero chases the running villain through the streets of Cairo. A different but equally gripping sequence appears in Lie Down with Lions (1985). When that novel’s pregnant heroine witnesses a young Afghan boy’s loss of a hand to a mine, she rips off her blouse to bind the wound and begins carrying the boy to medical help. On the way, she is beaten by an anti-Western Afghan outraged by her nakedness. She continues struggling to reach the doctor, her husband, only to be left alone when her labor begins prematurely. An ignorant midwife later delivers her daughter. Follett touches on a wide range of emotions throughout this series of events.

Follett’s plots brim with details to create setting, mood, and authenticity. In The Man from St. Petersburg (1982), he writes about Russian expatriates in pre-World War I London as if he had firsthand knowledge of their lives. Follett pays as much attention to the day-to-day details of life in a remote Afghan village as he does to the action of Lie Down with Lions. In the latter, he even includes a bibliography, listing the sources of his Afghan information.

Although Follett’s protagonists may not be as fully realized as those in the works of le Carré or Deighton, he is never satisfied with mere stereotypes, carefully delineating the characters’ social, political, economic, psychological, and sexual motives. His heroes are nagged by doubts about themselves, their work, and their worlds. Nat Dickstein, the Mossad agent in Triple, and Ellis Thaler, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative in Lie Down with Lions, hate their jobs and feel trapped in webs of deceit. Follett’s villains are always interesting, with a thin line often separating the good from the bad. In The Key to Rebecca, the novelist draws numerous parallels between his English hero and German antagonist. The Russian anarchist of The Man from St. Petersburg is portrayed as both hero and villain.

Follett plans each novel with his agent and editor's advice, calculations aimed at producing bestsellers. Realizing that the readership of espionage fiction is predominantly male and desiring to make his books more attractive to female readers, he has placed a strong female character at the center of each book. This character is an average woman, nonprofessional, frustrated romantically, with whom many female readers can identify. She is also intelligent, courageous, and resourceful—the moral center of the novel, given to expressing some of Follett’s social and political views. This heroine either assists the hero in foiling the villains or does so on her own. That she can be counted on to save the day makes Follett’s novels somewhat formulaic. This woman can also expect sexual fulfillment, leading to graphically erotic scenes, especially in Lie Down with Lions.

Follett offers a fictional theory in his 1979 Writer essay “Books That Enchant and Enlighten.” Claiming that most popular writers aim too low while their more serious colleagues wallow in “the trivia of middle-class life,” Follett asks novelists to refuse to settle for merely “exciting trash or thoughtful tedium.” He attacks the entertainers for creating wooden characters and writing carelessly and the aesthetes for dispensing with plot and “the world outside the mind,” suggesting that each type of writer incorporates elements of both popular and serious approaches:

The underwater knife fight is more exciting, not less, if it’s described in graceful, powerful prose; the plot has more drama if it depends on character development as much as [on] external events; the romance is more thrilling if the tall dark hero nurses a genuine, credible sadness behind that handsome-but-cruel smile.

According to Follett, writing successful fiction involves correctly presenting numerous elements, and he encourages novelists “to discover new things to get right.”

The Eye of the Needle

All elements of Follett’s fictional formula appear in Eye of the Needle, and his later books have offered variations on his achievement in this first major success. The Germans’ best spy, Heinrich von Müller-Güden, has been an undercover agent in England since before World War II. His code name is Die Nadel (the needle), after the stiletto he uses to dispatch those who get in his way. This master spy, Henry Faber (one of his British aliases), throughout the narrative, is a consummate professional who never allows anything to interfere with his duties, cutting himself off, as much as possible, from human emotions.

Faber has learned that the Allied base in Norfolk is a hoax, nothing but skeleton barracks, plywood tanks, rubber ships, and dummy aircraft. This stratagem is intended to convince the Germans that the inevitable invasion of the Continent will be at Pas de Calais. Faber must take his photographic evidence to Adolf Hitler in person so that all efforts will be directed farther down the French coast at Normandy. British intelligence must stop him before he reaches the submarine sent to pick him up somewhere off the coast of the United Kingdom.

Professor Percival Godliman and Frederick Bloggs, a former Scotland Yard inspector, are assigned to stop Faber. Godliman, who served in military intelligence during World War I, has engulfed himself in medieval studies following the death of his wife. Bloggs is also a widower, his wife, an ambulance driver, having been killed during the Blitz. Bloggs’s pursuit of Die Nadel is made more personal because he blames Faber for his wife’s death since the spy’s reports have determined where German bombs are to fall.

Like Faber, Godliman and Bloggs are lonely men who retreat into their work to substitute for their missing emotional lives. Ironically, both find refuge in the current chaos. The war simplifies moral issues and negates the daily banalities of ordinary existence. Follett’s characters need the extraordinary to rescue them from the mundane. Seeing them working in offices and living in the suburbs is impossible.

The other protagonists are Lucy and David Rose. David lost both legs in a traffic accident on their wedding day in 1940, just before he was to become a fighter pilot. Unlike Godliman and Bloggs, he has found no outlet for his frustrations and has become embittered, unable to escape his self-pity. He raises sheep on Storm Island, off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland, where he and Lucy live with their son, Jo, and an elderly shepherd. Jo was conceived before the wedding, and the couple have not had sexual relations since the accident. David refuses to let Lucy touch him, but she has become reconciled to her life in this remote, bleak spot. Like Faber, she knows nothing but isolation.

The arrival of the fugitive Faber disrupts the Roses’ lives. Attempting to reach the U-boat and flee Bloggs, he stole a boat during a gale, only to be shipwrecked on Storm Island. Faber has been celibate for seven years since any emotional involvement would distract him from his work, but he immediately senses a kinship with the lonely farm wife. Lucy is also drawn to the stranger, whose kindness and humor differ from her husband’s sullenness.

Lucy and Faber begin an affair, but the suspicious David finds the spy’s photographic negatives and confronts him. Their cliffside fight to the death is one of the most harrowing in all of Follett’s fiction. Die Nadel has more difficulty killing this legless man than he has ever had with any of his other victims.

When Lucy discovers that her husband is dead, she retains her composure, even to the point of making love to her husband’s murderer. Escaping with Jo to the radio for help, Faber pursues Lucy, and a bloody battle ensues. She takes an ax to Faber’s hand when he breaks into the cottage. Then, she keeps him from contacting the submarine by sticking her fingers into a light socket to knock out the radio. Finally, she chases Faber to the shore and shoots him.

Lucy’s amazing determination does not come out of nowhere; Follett has painstakingly painted a believable picture of her troubled marriage, showing the courage she needs simply to live with David. She draws on her unfulfilled needs in her passion for the stranger and finds similar strength growing out of her repression when she kills the man she loves but knows she must destroy.

However, the most interesting achievement in Eye of the Needle is Follett’s convincing portrait of the German spy. Faber is an outsider who thinks he can control the violent world around him. He has never joined the National Socialist Party, feels scorn for everyone in authority in Germany, dares to include sarcastic remarks in his reports because he believes in his invulnerability, and provides false information to prevent the bombing of St. Paul’s Cathedral because he respects it as a work of art.

Faber considers himself cool and dispassionate, yet he vomits whenever he kills someone. Attempting to turn his weaknesses into strengths, he realizes he can use his fears and insecurities to his advantage in his profession since a spy mistrusts everyone and everything. His instinct for survival fails him only when he drops his defenses with Lucy. He can accomplish his mission and win the war for the country he loves if he kills her, but he cannot bring himself to murder the person who has reminded him of his human frailties.

Although Follett may admire Faber’s efficiency as a spy, he does not intend for him to be a sympathetic character. He never allows his reader to forget that Die Nadel is a representative of one of the world’s greatest evils, even if Faber does not think of himself as a Nazi. Follett’s goal is to make the character a recognizable human being and avoid the cardboard villain so common in escapist fiction. Follett’s ability to create such believable, interesting characters is perhaps his greatest strength.

The Man from St. Petersburg

The Man from St. Petersburg begins with a meeting between Stephen Walden, a British aristocrat, and Winston Churchill, a government minister, who asks Walden to negotiate an agreement between Russia and Great Britain on the eve of the outbreak of World War I. Although out of power and a political rival of Churchill, Walden patriotically agrees to represent Britain and deal with his wife’s nephew, Prince Aleksy Andreyevich Orlov, the Russian envoy. The spy in enemy territory is Feliks Kschesinsky, a fearless anarchist whose torture and banishment to Siberia have made him despise authority and whose goal is the assassination of Orlov and the prevention of a Russian/British alliance. Muddying the waters is the fact that Charlotte, whom Walden believes is his daughter, is really the child of Lydia and Feliks, who once had a clandestine affair. When Charlotte, whose radical, liberal temperament resembles her mother’s, meets Feliks, she is drawn to him because of his liberal politics and even helps him try to kill Orlov.

Follett establishes the conflicts within the first few chapters—Labour versus Conservative parties, youth versus age, radical extremists versus upholders of the status quo, patriarchal men versus liberated women, and upper class versus lower class. Although Feliks and Walden love people and want to help them, that “love” is in the abstract. Walden is a decent man but callously dismisses a pregnant, unwed servant, and Feliks does not fear death because he does not love anyone in particular, only the “masses” whom he thinks he serves. At the novel's beginning, Feliks is the predator, and Orlov and Walden are the prey. Still, after Walden’s first attempt fails, he sets a trap for Feliks, only to have the talented and resourceful spy escape. From that point, Feliks becomes the hunted. Without Charlotte’s help, he would fail. Charlotte brings Feliks to Walden’s mansion, where Orlov is staying, and in the conflagration that he starts, Feliks successfully kills Orlov but discovers Charlotte is trapped in her room. Walden and Feliks, who now realizes that he truly loves his daughter and puts her escape ahead of his own, save Charlotte, but Feliks perishes in the attempt. Walden and Lydia discover they are in love, and he realizes he has been distant and aloof. Follett has it both ways: His spy is successful, but the treaty is not forestalled by Orlov’s death because Churchill orders that history will record that the death was caused by the fire, not by Feliks’s bullet.

The Key to Rebecca

Perhaps the most “literary” of Follett’s novels, The Key to Rebecca is tied to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), a novel about the difficulties a young woman has fitting into the aristocratic world of her husband, whose dead wife seems to haunt their home. Like Rebecca, Elene Fontana feels unworthy of the cultured, privileged man she loves, and her Jewish/Bedouin culture differs sharply from that of the British expatriate colonists. William Vandam, the British intelligence officer she loves, is pitted against Alexander Wolff, a master German spy intent on aiding a German victory in North Africa. Initially, things go Wolff’s way as he enlists the aid of a seductress who succeeds in getting information from a weak British officer. Still, gradually, Wolff is pursued, and Vandam, who has to contend with an officious and ineffective commanding officer, gains the upper hand. His capture of Wolff, however, depends on Elene’s collaboration and the plucky behavior of his son Billy. As in most Follett novels, the “hero” is a public servant determined to do his job despite repeated setbacks, not a suave superman in control throughout the story. As in many Follett novels, the emotionally arid hero learns to love and becomes a more complete human.

Lie Down with Lions

In Lie Down with Lions, two spies operate in Afghanistan. Ellis Thaler, the American CIA agent, is working against the Russians, and Jean-Pierre, a French communist whose father’s past has shaped his son’s political convictions, is working with the Russians. Caught in the middle is Jane Lambert, who first loves Ellis but spurns him when she discovers his CIA identity and who later marries Jean-Pierre and goes with him to Afghanistan, where he works as a doctor to the Afghans, whom he betrays. When Jane finds out that her husband is a traitor, she turns against him, and when Ellis turns up in Afghanistan, her love for him is rekindled. Ellis, earlier divorced from a wife who believed him to be cold and aloof, slowly allows his feelings for Jane to develop. When he and Jane flee from Jean-Pierre and his Russian comrades, Jane assumes control of the plot. She refuses to bomb the young Russian soldiers who pursue them because she thinks of their mothers, but later, it is she who kills Jean-Pierre so they can escape.

Like other spy novels, Lie Down with Lions is a love story about a strong woman, a man who finally allows his emotions to develop, and a villain whose past explains his behavior. It is also a political story about the contrasts between the Afghans and the Russians and between liberals and conservatives. The comparison between the American experience in Vietnam and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan is drawn, and the futility of both suggests the end of colonialist incursions in the rest of the world. The moral superiority of women over men in historical affairs is also part of the message: diplomacy, not weapons, is the answer.

Whiteout

In Whiteout (2004), Follett abandons the spy novel and returns to espionage, this time a search for a stolen biochemical weapon that is being sent to terrorists. Toni Gallo, chief of security at a pharmaceutical company, is pitted against three malevolent but somewhat comic thugs and the son of the company’s president, Stanley Oxenford, the older man she loves and from whom she is separated by class, income, and age. There are chase scenes, violent acts, incompetence interference, and nods to historical events. Still, the novel takes place one day at the Oxenford home, where the family, dysfunctional at best and beset by friction, comes together as ostensibly weak men gain their courage and children gain maturity to defeat the villains. More so than in the other novels, family seems paramount, and the focus is reconciliations between men and women and parents and children. As in the first few Follett novels, the technical information tends to overwhelm and ultimately disappoint Follett fans. Whiteout was adapted into a television series in 2010.

Additional Works

Follett began the Kingsbridge series in 2020 with The Evening and the Morning, a prequel to his 1989 novel The Pillars of the Earth. The series continued with World Without End (2007), A Column of Fire (2017), and The Armour of Light (2023). The Century Trilogy consists of Fall of Giants (2010), Winter of the World (2012), and Edge of Eternity (2014). Additionally, Follett continued publishing stand-alone works, such as the well-received Never (2021).

Bibliography

"Books." Ken Follett, ken-follett.com/books. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Follett, Ken. Interview. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December, 1978, pp. 95-96.

Follett, Ken. Ken Follett Epic Historical Collection. Signet, 2014. 

Ken Follett: A Reader’s Checklist and Reference Guide. CheckerBee, 1999.

Schneider, Jacqueline. "Novelist Ken Follett on Understanding the Present Through History." BBC, 7 Dec. 2023, www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231207-ken-follett-interview-influential-katty-kay. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Ramet, Carlos. Ken Follett: The Transformation of a Writer. Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1999.

Ramet, Carlos. Ken Follett and the Triumph of Suspense: A Popular Writer Transcends Genres. McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015.

Turner, Richard C. Ken Follett: A Critical Companion. Greenwood Press, 1996.