Best of the best
Generations have their popular writers, but centuries’ literary legends are few. Hugo and Tolstoy qualified, Hemingway and Grisham, Goethe and Dickens. Not to mention Shakespeare and Cervantes.
In this day and age, we have Britain’s Ken Follett. Critics approach Follett’s books — 30 to date — with awe, with worldwide sales at 160 million and counting. He doesn’t stick to any one period. The combination of extensive research and style make him the master of the historical novel, their settings millennia apart.
Historical novels are the exception to my dictum that novels over 350 pages are overwritten. More than a few of Follett’s stories are more than double that. Don’t let this hold you back from obtaining them. This reviewer kids you not, you may well want to peruse them more than once.
A Column Of Fire takes place in familiar territory: the England of the Tudors. Just about every contemporary historian focuses on it. Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry VIII’s six queens, was instrumental in causing a sea change in the nation’s history.
Divorcing his first wife, a no-no of dogma, turned the Pope and Catholic Europe against him. Though he never converted to a Protestant religion himself, he substituted the Church of England for that of Rome. Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, forcefully ensured that there would be no turning back.
Follett follows the determination of the continent to set her straight. Priests forced to flee by her father returned clandestinely. Assassins were recruited to cut her life short. Opposition to her kept growing. Among the strongest was Mary Stuart, the diehard catholic Queen of Scotland. She claimed to be the rightful Queen of England.
Hounded out of Scotland by the Protestants, circumstances had her passing through England, where she became Elizabeth’s unwilling guest for 19 years. England’s secret service was created to crack Mary’s coded correspondence to France. Her execution followed.
The Spanish Armada was overwhelming in terms of ships and men, but not in seamanship. The author gives us a daily account of the weeklong battle. Elizabeth died, of natural causes, in 1603. She was succeed by Mary’s son, James, turned Protestant.
Still at it, Catholic Guy Fawkes prepared to blow up the House of Lords. The plot betrayed by his sister, he was arrested at the last moment.
Britain has been fortunate in having good men come to the fore in times of crisis (eg — Drake, Nelson, Churchill). Alas, not every nation can say the same.