Ken Follett on Women, War and the Wonders of Stonehenge

125465643Excerpts from the interview:

Q: What was the genesis of this book?

A: I've known about Stonehenge more or less all my life, I visited it as a child. I saw the title of an archaeological book, ‘How to Build Stonehenge’. Now, that’s kind of a jokey title. There are lots of books called ‘how to get a girlfriend’ and ‘how to mend your Ford’ and so on... But what really struck me about that title was ‘building’. Building Stonehenge. That sounds like a Ken Follett book. Very little is known about Stonehenge. Indeed, very little is known about the Stone Age altogether. But as I looked into it, there were certain things historians generally agreed upon and certain things that are still mysteries. So it was a matter of researching what is known and then using my imagination to build on that.




Q: You work with all these characters and communities.

A: In Britain, at the time Stonehenge was built, there were three different types of community: farmers, herders and hunter-gatherers. And looking at Salisbury Plain, I thought it was quite possible that all three could have been represented in that neighbourhood. The plain itself is not good for farming because the soil is quite shallow... But it grows grass and the kind of shrubs that cows like to eat. So it’s perfectly good territory for grazing a herd. On the edges of Salisbury Plain, there are rivers. So it seemed to me quite plausible that there would have been farms in the river valleys. And finally, there are still today quite large patches of woodland, and that might well have been home to hunter-gatherers.

Q: The other thing which stands out is your sense of music in the story and the rhythm of your writing. It was almost like in the oral narrative.

A: The earliest stories that we know about, at least in Western literature, are the works of Homer and a long poem called the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’. These are poems that tell stories, and they're the oldest stories that we know. But before they were ever written down, most people think they were remembered in long poems. Historians think there were poets who would learn these off by heart. And so it seems very likely that in the Stone Age there would have been poems. As well as being entertainment, they often pass down information because it couldn’t be written down. So if you wanted something to be remembered for generations to come — for example, all early civilisations studied the sun and the moon — they could make up a poem about them... So I've imagined that in order to pass this knowledge down, they would have had songs and dances.

Q: Were the incidents based on anything documented?

A: Some is made up, some is inspired by things that I’ve read or might even be things that I’ve seen... I read an American novel set in towards the end of the 19th century and there was a very vivid description of a bear hunt. Before there were things like radio and radar; it was just people following the tracks of a bear and being quiet and intending to catch up with the bear but being quite scared... Most of the woodland law I got from articles and stories about people who lived in the woods, hunter gatherers, but also people living relatively primitive lives as farmers or herders... There's a moment in this book where they find a bees’ nest. But they have to separate the bees from the nest otherwise they'll be stung to death. And there is a way of doing that. And I got that from a book I was reading about how it would have been done hundreds of years ago.

Q: You don’t question the coexistence of the idea of revenge and hatred with different kinds of love.

A: This is a very sad fact about the human race. There has always been war. Some people have a fantasy that before civilisation, when everybody just lived in the woods, there was no war and people lived in peace. But we know now that that’s not true because the archaeologists find places where there are a thousand arrowheads... If there are a thousand arrowheads, then it must have been a battle. And these sites with the evidence of battle go back beyond the beginning of civilisation, back to the age of the hunter-gatherer. The other thing is the archaeologists dig up the bones of people who died maybe 20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago, before there were towns and govts and so on. And they can tell if there’s a broken bone. And if a man falls out of the tree and breaks his leg, it's a different kind of break from if somebody hits his leg with a stone and smashes it. And if there are many skeletons in a place where the bones have been smashed by being hit with stones, then they know that all of those people died of violence. We human beings were never a peaceful people.

Q: It turns out to be a very woman-centric novel. Your books have always had a female character who’s brutally sexually assaulted. But in this, there are only hints. Is this a conscious decision or an evolution of your authorial work?

A: I’m getting older and perhaps I’m a bit more gentle and I don’t want to write quite so much violence as I used to. We tend to assume that everything in history was done by men, and that’s not so. We used to believe that the cathedrals were built by men. And then a French historian studied the tax records of the city of Paris. And while Notre Dame was being built, he saw quite a lot of female names who were paying tax as glass makers, mortar makers, and sometimes even stonemasons. And so he proved that women as well as men were involved in building the cathedrals. So, I decided that Stonehenge would be a kind of Stone Age university in which they studied the movements up in the heavens. And my first thought — well, then the people who do this will be priests. And then I thought, wait a minute, they could be priestesses.

All through history, we find people pretended that women didn’t do anything important and ignored the fact that women were doing quite a lot of important things. We also know it from English surnames. You know, often in the middle age, your second name was your job. So I might be Ken Baker or Ken Brewer or Ken Weber. Weber was a weaver. But if a woman had that job, her surname, these names have female versions. So a woman weaver was a Webster; a woman brewer was a Brewster; a woman baker was a Baxter. The fact that these surnames are commonplace shows that women doing these jobs was commonplace.

Q: Have you ever been tempted to write about India?

A: I've often thought about it. I visited India and I have Indian in-laws, and so I’m very aware of India. I wouldn't want to write a book about the British in India. There are lots of books about that. And to me, it’s a tired subject. And the role played by the British in India is something that we can’t be very proud of. But of course, the history of India before the arrival of the East India Company would have been very interesting. So that would be a possibility for me. It would involve a lot of research, but that’s part of the fun. Yeah, it’s sort of on my list of maybes.