Ken Follett: The Waterstones Interview

hello I'm delighted to be here this morning which Ken Follett to talk about his new novel a third in the Kingsbridge series my pleasure so the Kingsbridge series yes always taking giant leaps through history between each novel and seve catapulted the reader from the 12th century in the building of a cathedral to the 14th century and ravaged by war and plague and now you take your readers through the fierce religious and political upheavals of the 16th century Europe so what drew you to this period in time to revisit the series I was drawn to this when I realized that Queen Elizabeth the first of England had started the very first English Secret Service the reason was that there were a lot of plots to assassinate her and she needed protection and so she set up the Secret Service to root out these assassins and these conspiracies and it was very successful because as we know she died an old lady in her bed and the more I learned about it the more kind of firm intrigue I was by how much of the paraphernalia of modern espionage was already in existence in the 16th century they had intercepted messages of course they weren't instead of being intercepted on the internet they were intercepted and bits of paper but it was the same principle and they had codes and they had people who could decode anything without having the key so it was a little bit like the Enigma story you know and I was kind of I thought it was good fun that all that stuff was in existence then and I saw how I could write a historical novel that would have lots of scenes of suspense in I think it lends itself to you to your writing particularly having Machiavellian figures working in the background and plotting and and also it seems to be a period where ordinary people have much more access to power partly through those those shadowy networks that they had they were able to influence people in a greater way I think that's true simply because they were just fewer people in the world so you know what was the population of England in 1558 it must have been it can't have been more than you know in the area of five or six million people I would guess and you know so so therefore a much higher percentage of the population would for example get to meet the Queen or even more get to speak to her principal advisors such as Sir William Cecil loo who lived in this house with Queen Elizabeth when she was a princess before she was a queen so yeah I think it was just a smaller world but it's a world that's opening up I mean it feels like quite a different animal this novel to the previous novels in the series partly because of the Scopes I mean this takes in Europe this is in it is a novel that looks beyond the boundaries of England with that part of looking at the 16th century that that people have access to the world and are going to work well if early on in the research for the book I realized that this was happening in the 16th century and it was kind of an additional reason for liking the idea I discovered at one point that the man who actually started the Secret Service whose name was Sir Francis Walsingham had been in Paris as the English ambassador during the famous massacre of st. Bartholomew which I already I wanted to incorporate that real-life incident into the book because it's so it's such a tremendous tragedy and a very dramatic scene and so I was able to combine the story of Queen Elizabeth's spies and Countess buyers with the story of the Wars of Religion in France and Walsingham was the connection and that's the kind of thing that gladdens the heart of an author doing research ah perfect um but more generally England was a poor country until the sixteenth century when it started trading and so the central family the Willard family in a column of fire has cousins and other relatives in key trading cities around Europe and that's their business so from Kingsbridge where the cathedral was built in The Pillars of the Earth this family reaches out to Seville in Spain and they have a warehouse in Calais and they do business in Antwerp and later in the novel one of the family comes home with a German rifle and not only was that happening but that was the beginning of England's prosperity and did he feel that that was a change as well from the early novels that power had shifted I mean there's a lot of focus in the earlier novels on religious powers particularly around monastic power and it there's a sense invisible that that has shifted very much towards commerce and the power of money yes I think that was always a conflict but you're right at this point in the sixteenth century a lot of the early supporters of Protestantism are businessmen and traders and and prosperous craftsmen they are people who are no longer willing to be told by somebody else what they ought to believe because they have certain amount of pride they are what we might now call self-made men and self-made men never like to be told what to do so a lot of the the rebellion again the established church the Catholic Church with its headquarters in Rome that rebellion comes from a lot of the time from the commercial world and there's a key reason for that which is that the commercial whether the world of the sixteenth century could not have existed without banking and the lending of money at interest couldn't have happened but actually the lending of money at interest was a sin yeah it's called usury and we find out all about it in Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice when the man who Charlotte and men who lends money at interest is the villain of the piece and a great monster okay what's happening and it is happening in your second it happened all the time and so that was part of the conflict between the what you might call the nouveau riche in Europe and the old established order what would you call them the Via riche and you talked about the the massacre at Paris and um it it was something that I think was a real strength of the novel it was probably my my favorite passage in the novel so obscene in the novel I'm but I was particularly interested in the way in which she decided to focus reaction from different individual perspectives so what you were getting was a very personal testimony of observing the massacre and was that important to you that you wanted this to be a personal view of other atrocities yes it was and that is true of all the parts of a column fire which are true stories because even even though there is real history in a column of fire it's always seen through the eyes of the fictional characters with whom I hope the reader will identify and that's made without that it's not really a novel I mean you you I could have I could have described the massacre of st. Bartholomew in a drug in sort of dryly factual way but it wouldn't have been very interesting to read we want to in a novel we want to see these things through the eyes of people we know and like so that when they're in danger we feel anxious for them and when they escape we feel triumphant for them and of course there's a certain amount of people rescuing one another as well which is which adds to the drama so I do think it's actually it's an essential part of a historical novel that you see scenes like that through the eyes and the fictional character and as does I think to the sense of fear and there is a real anxious fear when you're reading good that they're supposed to be scary penny-tees and I think part of that is being alongside the characters as they that they don't understand what's happening and and all of the things that they don't know that because uh very clever that you give the machination that are happening on the other side that the reader is has a preferential understanding of what what's happening but can can see how these other characters are having to to wait and find this information out or not knowing so I think that yeah well I I think that's very important you see it's it's okay for some of the characters to have partial information and so to be scared or hopeful have these emotions but and something like a massacre or a battle any scene of big big action some of the people will not know what's going on and I've got tossed I was the first person to do this in war and peace he described battles as completely confused affairs where orders were given and never received and triumphant skirmishes happen by accident but actually and of course that's the reality but I think it's very satisfying for them even if the characters don't understand what's happening it's very satisfying for the reader to understand what's happening and what the odds are and what's at stake and so on so I i readers i really like to do that i don't i don't want the reader to be confused the character can be confused but the readers never be confused at work i'm and it and it sets the stage i mean throughout the novel for some really Machiavellian characters and particularly pierre who i think is a fantastic a evil character i'm watching his rise from essentially a nobody to becoming so powerful and I mean that must be enjoyable to write a character like Pierre yes you've got to be a bit careful he is of course nasty you he needs to be nasty in the right sort of sorts of ways and he's quite cruel but it's sort of it's a bit boring if somebody is physically cruel if he just punches me that's sort of where so so I've tried to think of ways prepare to sort of torture people psychologically which is actually worse but also it I think it's more intriguing when you're reading if somebody is not just cruel and brutal but very cleverly and slyly cruel and I think the way that he becomes I'm intoxicated I think by his own cruelty as well that that actually I mean he begins of somebody he's clearly not it had fairly dubious moral code but it escalates as it goes through and as he I think he becomes addicted to that to that kind of psychological cruelty and it's very clever I think the way that you develop that it's reasonable thank you well yes I certainly was trying to do that I was trying to show how he started off as as sort of medium wicked yeah and just because of his ambition he just became more and more ruthless and unscrupulous and and means mindful I think it's interesting you talk about ambition and and I it seems to me that all the novels in this series are in some ways in or wars over ambition and the two sides of ambition as well because I'm there's a contrast I think between ambitions as forces and enables people to look beyond their own limitations and the limitations of their of their time you know developing things that they wouldn't previously seen and that's how society moves forward but also these figures who are undermined by their own hubris yes do you see them in that way yes I think and characters at least some of the characters need to be ambitious because if they're not then where's the drama if they just want a quiet life eh it's not worth writing a novel about somebody I just want to quiet I will have fade in Kim Kingsbridge yeah one of the one of the my working title for The Pillars of the Earth was vaulting and I thought it was a clever title because the novel is about ambition and because the ceiling and the cathedral is known as the vaulting but of course everybody thought it was about pol ball so that title was been I'm I would also struck by the stark parallels actually between I'm the events that you're describing in the 16th century and what's happening today particularly and sectarianism terrorism and religiously divided society and I wondered whether you think we're prone to see these as modern concepts or as in fact they're winning not unfortunately no religious hatred is tragically is fairly timeless I did think that part of the interest of the story would be that in trying to understand religious hatred in the 16th century we might we might move towards a slightly better understanding religious hatred in our own time I my feeling about it is that they're not that different it's the same it's the same sort of syndrome and everything I've learned about history in many years of writing historical novels has led me to think that actually a society that doesn't that kind of hatred between its people whether it's religious or racial or other forms of hatred society that doesn't have that hatred is unfortunately terribly unusual you know every now and again we achieve in a few places we achieve a few decades of living together peacefully and what you have to realize is that that doesn't very often happen then you need to cherish it when did that yeah and again as in the previous novels there are some brilliant love stories in here as well and I think the relationships between your characters is it's always brilliant and I think you really get that conflict between people's religious motivation and their religious belief and how that often interrupts people's personal relationships and and threatens to concede eyes them and in some cases stop them from being successful altogether in some ways that's where religious conflicts becomes most vivid when two people are in love and the fact that they belong to different religions gets in the way and that's a course when the prejudice of one religious group towards another religious group looks most stupid because these two people say we adore one another why can't we just be happy they won't let us be happy in some ways every love story is Romeo and Juliet because if the two lovers if two people fall in love and get together and get married and live happily ever after there's no story and it's great when it happens but it's not a story and then for our novel you need there to be something in their way so that they're gazing at one another across a crowded room and wishing they could be alone and that sort of thing and that's that's where the story comes in so um so it's it focuses the religious tension a love story like that focuses the religious tension and and and shines a spotlight on it and I think the advantage of having books which have the scope that you all have taken taking in so many years and is that you're able to see relationships and beyond the kind of first flush of youth and you're taking them and you see what happens to relationships over the pressures as time and and as people's beliefs change and and mold with time I suppose you're absolutely right that's exactly how I feel about it and probably the greatest attraction of writing long novels is that you can see that the characters entire life and a novel of normally normal length is it like a photograph of the characters at one stage of their life and it's usually a moment of great crisis in their lives but it lasts you see them live through this crisis and then that's the end of the novel if it's about a hundred thousand words but if but long novels like this you see them as maybe even as children but certainly as teenagers and then you see them saw and often get married and have children of their own and it's I think it's certainly more satisfying to write and I think many readers find it more satisfying to read when you can see you see all their hopes and and illusions as young people and you see how all that works out some of the things they believe in and some of the things they hope for work out well and some of the things that they believe in as teenagers just turn out to be completely wrong and they realize that and they gain wisdom as as sometimes we do and sometimes we done yeah you're absolutely right that I love that about writing long novels I can really show how a person's whole life turned out yeah I love it about reading them as well I am one of the things I've always enjoyed about your novels is that you're strong and strongly political female characters and and this is an era of extraordinary women in in power I'm Catherine de Medici two notable English Queens Mary Queen of Scots just to name but a few and but there's also a sense of real contrast I think between women in power and the very real difficulties that face everyday women and a lot of which are still the same dangers and difficulties which were facing women in your in your earlier novels without something that you would you were very conscious of when you were realizing it yes and I think given that I write about I usually write about women who are quite feisty it's inevitable that at least some of them will be dissatisfied with the role that society offers them at almost any period of our history and I focus on that because it's dramatic you know it's part of this person's story that she is learning and growing in this way and she's coming up against these barriers and she's trying to figure out how to get around them and it's it's I am sometimes accused of creating women who are too modern for the Middle Ages or the 14th century but I think there are always women who were bail against this and the rebels of the interesting wants to write us and I think the women that we do know more about I mean royal women for example certainly don't fall into it Asteria Carter being making passive women so and I don't know why we would assume that other women would conform to that as various hopeful things and well it's except that there's a sort of ideology that is accepted in a token way about the inferiority of women and and you know anything written and we'll look at the taming of the shrew you know it Shakespeare play about do about it Kate exactly the kind of woman that I would write about and what happens in the taming of the shrew is that she's crushed and that was fine in in ideologically in the sixteenth century that doesn't mean it represented reality you know and so my feeling about it is there's an there's an ideology about the inferiority of women that isn't really representative of any kind of reality it might make sense it doesn't exactly sense to me I'm throughout this novel there's a powerful and really visceral sense of the marks that people leave on on the world around them and I think I've been there through the series buildings like the one we're in now I'm printing presses the books that people carry and pass on and how they imprint their stories on their world is it important to how you create such an involving world to give readers a sense of walking through that history of feeling the fabric of the stories woven into the world around them it's very important to have that feel that it's the world the imaginary world that I've created is concrete there there's stuff in it the objects and buildings and when I started this with The Pillars of the Earth I really wanted the town of King George to be fully realized so that you would I mean you can do a story like that you see only describing the things that are absolutely proximate but I wanted the reader to have a sense of the whole place and how it worked together because the cathedral was built by the whole town everybody pretty much in the town had some role to play some people were giving money some people were getting the stone some people were drawing the plans and so on everybody was in some way touched by that so I wanted that to feel like a real town where even if even if you've never been down that street you know that there is a street and there's something at the end of it and so on so all of that was important the clothes that people wore and and how they cooked and the food that they ate and the knives that they carried and all that sort of thing I think is you've got of course you've got to do it the right way because nobody wants a list yeah you know of all the cutlery in the house or something like that but you do want you take the opportunity if you're going to have people have a dramatic conversation at the table that is your opportunity to discreetly without boring anybody tell them what what cutlery was used and what they drank from and whether they had any plates and what the table was like and how comfortable the chair work you can do all that in the course of a scene that is about something else and and and I think you really have to to give the reader the sense that it might be a real place and I think you get that with the sense of books and eBooks really important to this novel in there and Sylvie and her kind of desire to pass these they're his new year you know translated Bibles onto the floor there's a real sense of how precious these objects are other less and how important they are yes yes and Silvia Corsa Sylvie's one of the heroes of the story and she's a bookseller which is my favorite she's my favorite characters and she has to be my favorite character so the changes in the way that books are used throughout the three books I've written am at Kingsbridge quite interesting as I recall the library of Kingsbridge Priory in the 12th century had 12 books there is a library it's like that Bernard Shaw played where what the scene takes place in a library and there's a shelf with three weeks on it I forget that them which play that is and then in in world without end caris writes a pamphlet about how to deal with the plague and that of course that was based on a real phenomenon they were called I think they were called plague tracks and they were the first practical first aid handbooks and and they went all over the world and they were copied and copied about printing of course at the time they would copied and recopied and added to and that was really one of Cash's great achievements and you have Carol speaking her out for records people come to Kingsbridge and say I want to buy the plague track and now in the sixteenth century many more people can read and of course we have printing printing has been invented and and the two things the invention of printing and the increase in literacy is what is at the foundation of the of the political revolution of the sixteenth century which was Protestantism because people that people could buy books people could read them the Bible was translated into French and English and German and lots of languages so people could read in that you didn't have to know Latin and so people read the Bible and said wait a minute I'm not sure that the church is right about this because it seems to come and that's how it all begins so the fight about books the fact that Sylvie will be executed in court selling a French language Bible and the risks she takes in going to Geneva to buy some and smuggling them back into Paris and then hiding them and bring them out one at a time actually hides into the paper is but it's hot hot in the mouth stuff I think yes yes and and of course it's real because that's what people did they took those risks they risk their lives in order to bring what they felt was the Word of God to their neighbors so it's um it's kind of and I always in in real life and in my books I admire people are courageous it's a it's a really important virtue for me and that's how Sylvie displays her courage is by taking these terrible risk something she believes in yeah I'm my last question her three visit there's a suggestion just a glimmer at the end of the book of the new world um is that perhaps where if you were at any future novels in the Kingsbridge series where that where they might go when I decided to end the book with a reference to the Mayflower it's really to locate the story in history for people who only know that I only know that the Mayflower went in 1620 in that there will be French people who only know st. Bartholomew's Massacre and probably English people only know the Spanish 1588 but a lot of people to Clete American North American South American readers will know that 1620 Vista was the date of the Mayflower and so I put that in just for that reason to locate the story in the sweep of history for readers who you know who are not historians Dunham but since I've been doing interviews I think you're the third person who said to me is this a sign that Kingsbridge is going to be rebuilt in the new world and I never intended that but you know what it's not a bad idea excellent thank you very much for the fly difficulty you're welcome

Channel: Waterstones

Views: 22,142

Keywords: Ken Follet, The Kingsbridge Series, Watertsones, Books, Reading, Historical Fiction

Id: 06_WqmF3I9o

Length: 29min 47sec (1787 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 13 2017