After studying philosophy and politics at University College London, Ken Follett went back to Wales to work on his local newspaper. Not finding the round of courts and councils that a trainee reporter has to endure exactly riveting, he started writing novels in his spare time. And sometime in the mid-1970s, he hit the mother-lode with Eye Of The Needle, which sold 10 million copies.
I read it a couple of decades ago and thought it crap. Right up there with the rubbish that Jeffrey Archer peddles as literature.
So, imagine my surprise when I came across Oprah Winfrey’s well-regarded top 10 books and there was one of Follett’s, The Pillars Of The Earth. I thought either I have got this guy wrong or Oprah has, so I decided to give him one more go.
The blurb described the book as ‘epic’ and by God it was – all 900 or so pages. It was set in the political upheaval of 12th century medieval England and, rather cheerfully, begins with an execution.
After ploughing through it all, I thought I’m never doing that again. Although I don’t dispute it was actually very good, I found myself losing the will to live towards the end. But as James Bond found out, never say never.
About two weeks ago I found myself turning the last page of Follett’s Fall Of Giants at about 2am on a Friday night/Saturday morning.
I must have a masochistic streak as this one too was close to 900 pages, and dealt with three major themes – the First World War, the Russian Revolution and women’s suffrage.
The reason I mention all this was I was struck by a passage on page 688 when two British soldiers, George Barrow and Billy Williams, get into a discussion about why they are fighting in the aforementioned war.
Keep in mind George is, basically, a moron who thinks the Brits are superior to all other races, and objects to the Germans and others having colonies across the globe.
Here’s the passage I’m referring to as Billy, looking out at the German trenches, mulls over their conversation:
“George Barrow, who evidently had never seen an atlas, felt superior to Descartes, Rembrandt and Beethoven, and he was not unusual. They had all endured years of propaganda in school. Telling them about every British military victory and none of the defeats.
“They were taught about democracy in London, not about tyranny in Cairo. When they learned about British justice, there was no mention of flogging in Australia, starvation in Ireland, or massacre in India. They learned that Catholics burned Protestants at the stake, and it came as a shock if they ever found out that Protestants did the same to Catholics whenever they got the chance. Few of them had a father like’s Billy’s Da to tell them that the world depicted by their school teachers was a fantasy.”
That a mainstream, best-selling British author would actually write this took me by surprise. Big time.
You see there were four million people who used to buy The Sun who believed what George Barrow believed.
Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail readers still do, if the whole hoo-ha about the interim England soccer boss, Lee Carsley, not singing God Save the King is anything to go by.
And I came across a personal example while sitting at a café along the seafront in Torrevieja and watching a group of young English lads – squaddies by the look of their hair-cuts – take over about three tables and ignore everyone else in the queue as they demanded a young waitress serve them first. One of them literally whistled at her, as if they were participants in BBC’s One Man And His Dog.
Put it like this, something tells me there is no way a group of young Spaniards would have behaved in that arrogant, condescending way in Manchester.
For some reason the personification of all this for me is Jeremy Clarkson who, in his varied utterances, bemoans the passing of those halcyon days when Britannia ruled the waves and the ruling class could smoke their cigars and sniff their brandy in peace.
I recently came across one of his columns which promulgates many of the views that pervades that Brexit-loving part of the UK electorate:
“Of course, a great many people think all this can be solved by Diane Abbott, Angela Redfearn, or whatever she’s called, and Sir Starmer, but it can’t. Not really. What we need is hope... That’s what Mrs Thatcher gave us in the eighties. Hope. A chance to buy our houses and our national institutions and to become shareholders and make cash and beat the Argies and make Britain great again.”
You couldn’t make it up, could you? Nothing’s really changed.
That a mainstream, best-selling British author would actually write this took me by surprise. Big time