📚 Reading “The Armor of Light”

This morning, I finished reading The Armor of Light by Ken Follett, which is the latest novel in the Kingsbridge series. I recommend the novel and I’d like to share my enthusiasm. There won’t be any spoilers in this post but there will be hints, so if you haven’t read the book and you plan to, you might as well wait before reading the post.

I’m a fan of historical novels and this is not my first book by Follett. (I’ve read A Column of Fire, Fall of the Giants and Winter of the World.) His books are extremely well-written and captivating: I find them to be wonderful companions when I travel. I’ve also recommended them to a few friends, including ones who are less in the habit of reading, and they’ve gone on to read several books by Follett.

A quality I enjoy in Follett’s books is that he lets us witness historical events through the eyes of ordinary folks. Sometimes these characters end up playing an instrumental role (in Column of Fire, one of the main antagonists essentially causes the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre). Often times, the characters merely endure events that surpass them. They have little agency in the unfolding of these events and yet they fully experience their consequences. The Armor of Light, more so than other books I’ve read by Follett, emphasizes this point.

The book mostly focuses on the town of Kingsbridge and how its habitants deal with the impact of the Napoleonic wars (higher taxes, inflation, conscription, and anti-union laws for fear of seeing the sparks of the French revolution spread in Great Britain). The book doesn’t go too deep into how the characters feel about the french revolution–some express sympathy for the uprise against aristocracy and the book often questions the competence of leaders who have inherited their positions rather than earn them; others feel they have a patriotic duty to defend their country against a potential French invasion. But the characters mostly focus on how to improve their livelihood. They fight either to give more rights to workers or deprive them of it; they seek to educate or be educated; they struggle to feed their children; or they compete to earn an army contract to supply uniforms for the army.

Another major theme in the book is the introduction of machinery in the weaving industry. Naturally, the benefits of the technology are hardly distributed: the business owners—who granted, invest and take the risk—reap most of the benefits; the workers on the other hand are ruthlessly sacked, lose their employment, and find themselves impoverished by the new technology. The more reasonable employers, who care about the well-being of their employees, are forced to follow suit in order to stay competitive and keep their business afloat. The book introduces an unusual character (a working class child in the first act of the book) who becomes an able engineer, earns his keep selling machines and later finds himself at odds with his step father, who lost his position at a mill.

A notable choice is that the book almost exclusively focuses on people in Kingsbridge. This is to be contrasted with A Column of Fire, the previous volume in the Kingsbridge series, whose characters are scattered across England, France, Spain and more. I went into Armor of Light expecting the same. When I saw the book started in 1792, I hoped to read about the rise of a working class Frenchmen in the ranks of the revolutionary army—one whose perspective would contrast with the British experience of the war; or perhaps a pupil of Beethoven in Vienna, at first enthusiastic about the French republic and later disappointed by the French empire. But Follett’s decision to only gives us Kingsbridge’s perspective is effective: it portrays the war as a distant, almost intangible thing that still completely disrupts the daily life of the protagonists.

One reservation I had while reading the first half of the book is that the novel clearly tells us which characters to root for and which ones to dislike. There is nuance of course: some characters have tragic backgrounds; others are flawed but the novel signals that they are good-hearted and that we should not judge them too harshly. But some characters seem simply there to be disliked. The first chapter already depicts one such characters as absolutely despicable. He becomes a formidable adversary to one of the protagonists. Emotionally, this is effective: it makes us root for a character, it creates suspense and a conflict whose resolution we care about. But it also makes the antagonist seem flat. A mediocre and yet incredibly destructive being. An unrelatable person. I prefer it when the characters can be understood and we can have some sympathy for them—even if we ultimately disagree with their actions. This bothered me a bit but it certainly did not stop me from reading. Which is good because most of the characters do eventually change, undergo their arcs, even though it takes many pages or many years in the story. Sometimes, the arc carries out across generations, with the children refusing to live as their parents did, which is always a powerful theme. All in all, the novel reminded me that life is long, very long, and that many things will change as the decades march by.

In conclusion, it was a very enjoyable and thought-provoking read. Even though the novel is set in a historical period, much of its topics seem particularly relevant to today’s society. I like remembering that some of the challenges we face are not as new as they might seem. And of course, the book takes us into the innermost worlds of its characters: it is fascinating to see their perspectives on historical events and even more so to simply witness their humanity.