I wanted to see history from multiple points of view, says Ken Follett

Ken Follett is one of the world’s wealthiest authors, having sold more than 100 million copies of his books. His first big success was The Eye of the Needle in 1978, a spy thriller, but he has been turning out bestsellers even after moving to historical fiction.

His latest money-spinner is a trilogy, the first part of which is an 850-pager published by Pan Macmillan called Fall of Giants. It covers the First World War and the Russian Revolution, an unlikely setting for a pop novel, you would have thought, but there are apparently a lot of readers out there who like to learn about great historical events even as they enjoy a gripping yarn. In an interview with DNA, Follett explains how he manages to combine a history lesson with fast-paced action.

A part of the book is based in the mining towns around Cardiff in Wales where you were born. What are the autobiographical elements in it?
My grandfather did what Billy Williams did in the opening part of the book. At the age of 13, he went down the pit, as they say, and started work as an apprentice coal miner. But he didn’t spend his life as a miner because he had a weak heart. When he was 16 he was fired, which turned out to be a good thing because he started selling bread door to door, then opened a shop and was quite successful. My mother was born in Mountain Ash, which is just like the fictional town Aberowen in the story. We lived in Cardiff but went to Mountain Ash frequently to see my grandparents. A lot of the Welsh culture comes from things she told me. She relished Welsh humour. And the other thing that comes from my own family history is the religion. My grandparents belonged to one of those very puritanical sects, like the Williams family. The arguments that Billy has with his father are all the same arguments that I had with my father.

Like Billy, did you also turn your back on religion?
I chose to study philosophy in university because I was still troubled by religion. Now I’m an atheist and a humanist, and very happy about it.

Is the discussion on religion in the book also a way of connecting with talking points of the day like paedophilia in the church, which figures in one of the conversations?
There’s a glancing mention of paedophilia in the book. When Lev and Grigori are orphaned, they go to a priest for help and he attempts to abuse them. That’s in there because that’s exactly the kind of thing that happens to orphans. In this horrible scandal about Catholic priests and sexual abuse of children, some of the victims are orphans in Catholic orphanages.

I wasn’t trying to get at the church in the book, but I do feel very strongly that when children are abused, our first duty is to help the child. What happens in church is that the focus is on the priest. Can he be forgiven? Will he promise not to offend again? That’s the wrong focus. We shouldn’t be worrying about the priest; we should be worrying about the child. At present, the child doesn’t get help, the priest doesn’t get punished, and the matter is not reported to the police. And that’s Vatican policy. So the man’s name doesn’t go on the register of sex offenders, and many of these priests have gone on to offend again, we know that. This is a terrible situation and the Pope must change it.

Fall of Giants covers the events surrounding the First World War. Is that a subject you think young people today will relate to?
I think it’s not something that young people are particularly interested in, but I will make it intriguing for them in the book. I don’t think you have to write about things that people are already interested in.

But you do set great store by mass appeal for your books, don’t you?
What you’ve said is right in a way because I think all the time about the reader and what the reader will like, but that is not a matter of asking people what they’re interested in and writing about that. I read about the Middle Ages, a brutal time by comparison with our lives today, and asked myself what other period of history would have that kind of excitement and danger. I realised it’s the 20th century that’s been very violent and dramatic. We killed one another at an unprecedented rate.

Two world wars, bombing of Berlin and Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki; millions of people killed in Stalin’s Russia and Maoist China. It’s a terrible record of bloodshed but it’s also a century of democracy, freedom, and equality for women. So what appeals to me about the 20th century is that contrast between terrible slaughter and high ideals.

You’ve tried to bring this history to life through different sets of characters — British, American, German, and Russian — who keep bumping into each other. Do you worry that these artifices to move the story along may distort the historical account?
It’s certainly an issue but my principle is that I should never violate history. For example, Lenin spent much of 1917 outside Russia in hiding in Finland. So I never have Lenin in St Petersburg on a date when he was actually in Finland.

Even if there were only three people in the world who knew that I was messing about with history, I still wouldn’t do it, because I want to be able to say to my readers that the history in my book is true. And I think they like the feeling that they’re learning something about these historical events as well as enjoying the story that I’ve made up.

But don’t the requirements of telling a gripping, suspenseful, fast-paced story run counter to providing an educative historical account?
The great thing about writing a novel as opposed to a history book is that I don’t have to put everything in. A historian has a duty to be comprehensive. I don’t have to do that. I can just show you the turning points, the dramatic moments. A good example is the countdown to the outbreak of the First World War. Many, many books have been written about this. There is endless detail about the moves and counter-moves of the Austrians and the Serbians, the Germans and the Russians, the French and the British. I could’ve written a thousand pages on that but I don’t have to; I just have to show the reader one or two dramatic turning points when decisions were made that took us closer to the war. The challenge is to find those key points, and figuring out what to leave out.

Aren’t you tempted to produce a substantive work of non-fiction after all this historical research?
Not in the least. I do something different, you see. As a novelist I can go into the minds of individuals. It’s a different way of looking at history, but it’s equally important. For example, we see the Russian Revolution through the eyes of Grigori, a factory worker in St Petersburg. My question about him is — what is there about his life that makes him angry enough to pick up a gun and go out in the street and shoot? You don’t get that in a non-fiction history book.

How much have you been influenced by books like Dr Zhivago or Gone with the Wind or Herman Wouk’s Winds of War?
Tolstoy invented this kind of novel when he wrote War and Peace, which mingles the personal with the political. So that’s an influence on everybody who has ever written a historical novel. It’s interesting that Dickens’ historical novels were not very good (perhaps because War and Peace was only published towards the end of Dickens’ life). Barnaby Rudge is regarded as one of his lesser novels. And even The Tale of Two Cities is actually very bad at telling the story of the French Revolution, although the other things in the novel are wonderful. You mentioned Herman Wouk. I reread his two books when I was starting work on this, and that gave me a lot to think about.

Rather like me, he contrives to have members of a family in various key points. But I decided to do one thing differently from all of those books which see the great historical events from the point of view of one country. Herman Wouk sees everything from an American perspective, Tolstoy sees everything from a Russian perspective, a wonderful novel called All Quiet on the Western Front about the First World War sees it purely from a German point of view. Reading these books made me decide not to do that. So that’s why I have Russian, German, American, English and Welsh families because I wanted to see these events from a wider perspective.

For a writer like you, WikiLeaks must be a gold mine of first hand material on diplomatic exchanges between various countries…
You know, I think we could’ve made this up without too much difficulty. There were no surprises for me. What are we shocked about? Diplomats and politicians saying to one another ‘I hate that guy, he’s such a nuisance’? Some of the things that governments keep secret are really wicked and have to be exposed, but the trouble with WikiLeaks is that it’s indiscriminate. Sometimes these leaks are things we really need to know about, and sometimes they’re just embarrassing stuff.