Ken Follett came to prominence in the 1970s with a string of international bestsellers, chief among them the Edgar Award-winning Eye of the Needle. It seemed back then that he had found a comfortable niche as a thriller writer in the manner of such contemporaries as Robert Ludlum and David Morrell. That perception changed dramatically with the 1989 publication of The Pillars of the Earth, a thousand-page epic focussed on the decades-long construction of a cathedral in medieval England. The novel was an immense gamble and an equally immense success, selling millions of copies and creating a template for the sort of vast historical dramas that would dominate Follett’s fiction in the years to come.
Follett returned to Kingsbridge, the primary setting of Pillars, in two subsequent novels: World Without End and A Column of Fire continue Follett’s absorbing, deeply researched fictional history of England, carrying the story forward to the early 17th Century and the religious conflicts of the Elizabethan age. In his latest, The Evening and the Morning, Follett moves backward in time to the Dark Ages. The story concerns the gradual creation of the town of Kingsbridge and of the many people – priests, nobles, peasants, the enslaved – who played significant roles.
As Follett notes in his afterword, the Dark Ages left relatively little concrete evidence behind, leaving “room for guesswork and disagreement”. His re-creation of the period – the hazards, the harsh physical realities, the competing influences of politics and religion – is detailed and convincing, providing a solid underpinning to the later installments of the Kingsbridge series. The Evening and the Morning begins in 997 and ends 10 years later, a relatively compressed period for a Follett novel. There is no overarching plot, but rather a series of subplots involving the adventures, misadventures and struggles of a socially diverse cast of characters.
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