Culture

Thrillers, Spy stories… and Builders of Cathedrals

He is one of the most widely read contemporary writers. His books, always at the top of the best-seller lists, are set, for the most part, during World War II. Every character, from the “bad guy” to the solitary hero and the least important “walk-on,” is treated with passion and attention to detail

By LAURA COTTA RAMOSINO

Among intellectuals, it is fashionable, from time to time, to hurl accusations at the notorious “consumer literature,” made up of books with garish covers and suspicious contents, good for last-minute gifts and for filling up the half-empty shelves of the living room bookcase, and responsible for the summer stupor of the average vacationer.

Many years ago, GK Chesterton, in a humorous and paradoxical little book entitled, eloquently, The Defendant (JM Dent & Sons, London 1914), warned so-called “men of culture” about treating so-called “popular fiction” in a disparaging or patronizing way, as though it were the main factor responsible for the moral degeneration of youth and the development of criminality among the lower classes.

There is an infallible method, in any case, for “sniffing out” what the common folk really like to read. All you have to do is ride the subway in the morning, between 8 and 9 a.m., when the cars are the most crowded and patience is most limited, and look around you. Among the people packed together, there is always someone hanging on precariously, one hand holding on and the other clutching a thick book. At every stop, he risks falling to the ground, or even worse, onto some irritable neighbor, but he never stops reading. Well, among these “prisoners” of reading, you will always find at least one with Ken Follett’s latest best seller or a paperback edition of one of his earlier successes. Follett’s stories are this above all: exciting plots that keep you glued to the page for hours, maybe even until 2 in the morning when you have to get up the next day for work…

The pleasure of literature
Ken Follett is, in a certain sense, a typical product of post-war England. His parents, who were very religious, did not allow him and his brothers to watch television, go to the movies, or even listen to the radio. Young Ken’s best company was the many stories his mother told him and the fantastic adventures created by his own imagination. “I did not have too many books of my own, and I have always been grateful to the public library. Without free books, I would never have become an avid reader, and if one is not a reader, he cannot be a writer.” When he was ten years old, his family moved to London, where Ken finished school. He then decided to pursue a degree in philosophy at University College. This might seem an odd choice for the son of a tax inspector, but it is a rather obvious one for the writer, who attributes it–like his passion for politics (he is active in the Labor Party, and his second wife is a Labor Member of Parliament)–to the religious upbringing his parents gave him. He was also moved by the desire to find an answer to the countless questions he asked himself. These questions became concrete reality when, during his first term at the university, his girlfriend Mary got pregnant and the two decided to get married. Many years of hard work ensued, during which Ken worked as a journalist during the day to support his family and wrote novels at night and on the weekends, until his first success in 1978, The Eye of the Needle, made him famous (and also made another job completely unnecessary!)

In the publishing world, Ken Follett is known as the king of thrillers and spy stories and, in effect, from his very first best seller, most of his books are set during World War II, among pitiless murderers working for the Third Reich, brave heroes of the Resistance, and ingenious solvers of enigmas in the service of His Majesty and freedom. Follett loves these solitary heroes, who are at times frail and confused, especially in the face of love and betrayal. It is clear that he hates to make them suffer, as he is forced to do in order to draw in his readers.

Meticulous care
But what makes Follett a true master of his genre is probably something less sensational: the extraordinary passion with which he is capable of sketching not only his protagonists, but also his “walk-ons,” the characters who, in the jargon of American detective novels, are DOAs, dead on arrival. They come onto the scene only to be killed on the next page. And yet, even for them, Follett shows meticulous care, but also–and this is even rarer–a pity and attention that border on the maternal.

And what about the “bad guys,” often so complex and fascinating as to deserve the place of protagonist? In The Eye of the Needle, an invincible, cruel Nazi spy takes refuge on an island off the coast of England, with the information that could reveal to Hitler the date and place of the landing in Normandy. But he finds himself faced with a woman, first as a lover and then as an unpredictable adversary, alone but determined, who is capable of risking her life to keep him from carrying out his mission. And we readers, naturally, expect from the beginning that this unfeeling murderer, practically inhuman in his infallibility, will be defeated and eliminated in the end. And yet… and yet even for the death of Needle (which is the spy’s code name), in the end we are forced to shed at least one tear, because Follett does not ever let us forget that, in the depths of their hearts, in the face of death, love, friendship, and passion, these terrible individuals are people like us; they suffer and are willing to do anything, even if for a mistaken ideal.

Chance beginning
The most famous and best loved of Ken Follett’s novels, however, is not a thriller or a spy story, but a story about cathedrals.

Follett relates that the idea came to him by sheer chance. When he began writing novels, he realized that he knew nothing about architecture and buildings, and decided to buy himself a couple of books that could at least teach him some architectural terminology. Thus, he began to take more and more interest in medieval cathedrals, to the point that he started making trips to Lincoln or Winchester, where he would take a room in a hotel and stay there a couple of days just to look at the church. In this way, bit by bit, the plot of The Pillars of the Earth began to take shape in his head. Naturally, his friends were skeptical. What was a writer of thrillers doing writing a book on the building of a church?

But Ken was sure that his idea was a good one: building a cathedral was a big undertaking, which required at least thirty years of work and involved every type of person, from monks to knights; from the king to the master builders who worked on it. It was a magnificent mechanism for recounting the life of his characters, for showing how a great ideal grew and took shape in all its concreteness, perhaps the greatest ideal that the medieval world had ever produced. Follett fell in love with this great dream, but he did not even think of censuring all the misery, violence, and contradictions of a dramatic age (in the middle of the twelfth century, England was ripped apart by a terrible civil war), so that here and there are some strong, even shocking, scenes. It takes more than a thousand pages to see the cathedral rise and, naturally, to solve the mystery that sets events in motion, a discovery that, in the end, will reunite all the characters.

Prior Philip and the Cathedral
Kingsbridge Cathedral is born above all out of the dream of Prior Philip. Taken in as a child in a monastery, along with his brother, after his parents are killed by English soldiers, the Welsh monk is an extremely practical man, but also animated by deep faith. Even though he is surrounded by men of God who have very little of the holy about them, he acknowledges God and His Church to be the only force capable of standing up to the injustice and violence dominating the world around him. For his dream, he is willing to knock obstinately on the doors of the powerful and of all the sovereigns who succeed each other on the throne of England, and does not stop even in front of all the apparent failures of his project, the scarcity of money, the opposition of men, or even the collapse of the building.

The church is begun by Tom the builder as an offering for the soul of his wife, who died in childbirth, but is finished many years later by his adopted son Jack (who just happens to be responsible for the fire that destroyed the earlier church), following a long trip all the way to Santiago de Compostela, during which he discovers the miraculous beauty of the French cathedrals and finds his woman and child again, after years of separation.

Jack’s wonder in front of the stained glass windows of Rheims Cathedral must have been the same as Follett’s himself when he saw them for the first time, and it stayed with him for years, as evidenced by the fact that we find it again in his recent book, Jackdaws.

It is this very wonder and the desire for beauty that set everything in motion. When Tom shows Philip the plans for the cathedral for the first time, and the prior asks him just why he wants to build it, Tom, who is a simple man, does not immediately know how to answer, but then he says what for him is the truth: “Because it will be beautiful.” And Philip agrees with him: there is nothing better than making something beautiful for God, and if that project is the most precious thing he can offer Him, God will accept it.

Vain victory
But The Pillars of the Earth also becomes the story of how men seek in every way to organize the future and to impose their own order on reality, often even at the cost of upsetting and bending the lives of others. This is the sin above all of the nobility and kings, like Henry II who, exasperated by the impossibility of subjecting Archbishop Thomas Becket to his will, sends his knights to kill him right in Canterbury Cathedral. And it is a temptation into which even a good man like Philip falls. The fire in the ancient church of Kingsbridge surprises him at the very moment when, like the rich man in the Gospel parable, he is calculating how he can utilize the resources of his monastery in the best and most productive way. The ruinous collapse of the first vault of the cathedral only reminds him that this is, first and foremost, not his work, but the work of an Other.

It is no coincidence that the book ends with the symbolic scourging that Philip, who has become Bishop, and other men of the Church impose on Henry II as a punishment for Becket’s death. In that moment, Philip realizes that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s death demonstrates that the State can prevail over the Church only by the use of brute force, but that this is a vain victory. He also realizes that the devotion to St Thomas à Becket that arose spontaneously in the people and the king’s subsequent humiliation are a powerful sign of an epochal transformation and of a world that is no longer the same.