The beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the construction of the first factories with the arrival of the steam engine and the endless Napoleonic wars, Waterloo included, are the setting for the novel with which Ken Follett concludes the series that, without knowing it at the time, He began with The Pillars of the Earth, his biggest global success. The Armor of Light (Plaza Janés in Spanish and Rosa dels Vents in Catalan), its fifth and final installment, takes the mythical town of Kingsbridge to the 18th century. To a world in full technological and political transformation in which Luddites attack machines and the lower classes fight to educate themselves and have a voice. A world that has parallels with the current one, as Ken Follett (Cardiff, 1949) explained in Madrid, where he presented his new novel.
We are experiencing a profound technological change as in 'The Armor of Light'. Do you see parallels between both times?
Yes, I see three similarities. First, we are experiencing a technological revolution in both cases. But second, we are also experiencing a war in Europe, in the 18th century the Napoleonic Wars and today the war in Ukraine. And thirdly there is also a cost of living crisis. Food prices skyrocket. In the 18th century it was the price of bread, which doubled, which represented a catastrophe for many families and today all food prices are being inflated. I must say that we are not as cruel today as we were then. In my country or in Spain there are Food Banks where you can get food for nothing and in my country many people are using them, people who you might think are middle class but whose salaries have not grown with inflation and they have problems. They are parallels, but not reflections, and perhaps we can deal with this crisis better than they did in the 18th century.
What can we do better?
That there are Food Banks shows that we do what we can for the losers, in the 18th century they were ignored, they could die of hunger or pneumonia, which was what typically happened with malnourished people. Today there is no need for anyone to die or go hungry, even if there are people who are still malnourished. We are better. But we can do better with people hit by technological change. Sometimes people do a job for half their lives and suddenly that job no longer exists because a machine does it. He can learn to do other things, but we must help him do it, to acquire new skills. And we can do that better than what we do now.
In your novel there are people who say that progress cannot be stopped and others who try to stop it by destroying machines, also intermediate solutions. Where are you?
Telling a story, both sides of the question are important to me. I had to show the thinking of people who destroy machines and capitalist thinking. Hornbeam is a twisted man, but he is also terrified that anarchy in the working class will destroy what he has spent his entire life building. We don't sympathize with him much, he is quite evil, although he has reasons for being the way he is because he was once an orphan, with no way to get food. I try not to take positions, although everyone knows my political inclinations, I belong to the Labor Party and my wife has been a Labor MP. And when I was 19 I demonstrated in front of the American embassy against the Vietnam War.
But as a novelist I have to show all sides and create at least some sympathy for most of the people in the story. The novels I make cannot be used for political propaganda. There are political novels that I admire, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, about slavery, very good, or Orwell's Animal Farm. I would like to do something like that, but you can only write what comes out of you. I have tried to write science fiction and over time I have realized that I can't. I try to show all sides of the disputes and perhaps it is the best thing to do, perhaps if you understand both sides you will not change your mind, and you will continue to be conservative or communist, but perhaps a softer conservative or communist.
In the novel, some see the new machines as an invention of the devil and provoke a fear that leads to thinking about artificial intelligence. Are you concerned?
It will change our society, but I don't feel it as a threat. I have ChatGPT and last week I asked him to write a chapter of a novel in the style of Ken Follett. And it was very interesting because it was terrible, full of clichés, it gave me confidence. He can't write better than me.
How do you see that figure that hovers over the entire novel, also with conflicting visions, Napoleon?
A complicated figure. Ridley Scott's new film apparently says he was like Hitler. No. He was a dictator, there is no doubt, he was not a democrat, but he did good things. When he conquered Italy he abolished the Jewish ghettos, he was enthusiastic about education for girls and was a great general. He defended the country against him and lost in the end, but all the European countries attacked France together because they wanted to annul the revolution, they were afraid. And it took them 23 years to defeat France. And even the last battle, that of Waterloo, was just barely. And you can't say he was like Hitler. There were no death camps. It was not that. People who say Napoleon is like Hitler or Trump is like Hitler is nonsense because they have not created death camps. They may be fascist or very dangerous, but saying they are like Hitler diminishes how terrible it was.
You always say that you are fascinated by how people have fought for freedom in history, and even won. Is 'The Armor of Light' a good example? And do you think that today, with the rise of populism, we are winning or losing that battle?
In The Armor of Light they fight for freedom of expression because the government, so frightened by the French Revolution, became very repressive and made it a crime to discuss the reform of Parliament, and for the freedom to form a union, which was classified as crime by the government of the time and had nothing to do with the war. Today is a complicated time. Some of the things I took for granted when I was young, like freedom of speech, are under threat. The independence of judges, for example. One of the first things fascists do is try to control the courts and judges.
And that's happening now in Poland and Israel, and it's already happened in the United States with many far-right Republican Supreme Court members. That first step has already been taken. The reason they want to control the courts is that it could prevent them from becoming dictators. And the other thing they need to do is control the press, which they have already done in Hungary. And then, of course, in Turkey people voted to lose their freedom. Is hard to understand. I believe there are threats to our freedom. It's not all over, we can and will fight back, it will be a great fight. But I can't say we are guaranteed to win.
Is bread and peace, as some of its characters claim, enough?
They didn't ask for freedom, right? They asked for bread and peace. Sometimes in emergencies we forget. And I suppose that people who vote for far-right parties have forgotten about freedom. And they do not realize that freedom will help them achieve bread and peace.
When you started 'The Pillars of the Earth', did you imagine it would follow the town of Kingsbridge for several centuries?
No, I didn't have any plans, and in fact I didn't write another book about Kingsbridge for 17 years. But the sequel to that book, World Without End, people loved. And I started to realize that they loved Kingsbridge. And I really like to write about that town. So the next time I had an idea for a historical novel, I thought: Why not set it there? And that's how it came about. Looking back now, I never thought of it as an ensemble, I was just looking for an exciting story. But in retrospect, I can see that these five novels plus the Century Trilogy form a corpus and are united by the theme of freedom.
How do you see your country today? Has Brexit been a big mistake? Is it being resolved?
Most people who voted for Brexit now believe it was a mistake. Actually, there is no debate about it. But how it is going to be resolved is difficult, because if tomorrow our government went to the Europeans to say: we want to unite again, they will tell us, no, no, no, no, please, please. Because we have been a nuisance, the troublemakers. So, we have to repair things. It will take time to repair our relations with the rest of Europe and we are going to have to show Europeans that we are not crazy anymore. And maybe ten years from now we can rejoin the community or maybe we will just have business agreements that will make us very close.
But something like this is yet to come. Now we are going in that direction. The Labor Party wants to improve trade relations with Europe. And if we win the election, which we probably will, it will be Keir Starmer's responsibility to reach better deals with Europe, deals that are better for Europeans and better for us.
Among his novels is 'The Man from Saint Petersburg'. Would you dedicate today to Vladimir Putin?
Yes, my goodness, Russians are, what's the word, self-harming. They had the tsar and they got rid of him, and then they had Lenin and Stalin, and then communism came to an end, and now they have Putin. They always seem to end up with a dictator worse than the last. I feel sorry for the Russians. I don't know how they managed to be so unlucky.
