The Armor of Light is not the grand finale to the Ken Follett’s Kingsbridge series that I hoped it would be. It’s probably a tad better than A Column of Fire, but it does not even come close to the other three entries.
On the positive side, Follett attempted fresh spins on the character archetypes that should be oh-so-familiar to anyone who has read the Kingsbridge series. The love story isn’t quite a fairy tale, the primary heroine is a more maternal than damsel, and even the villain has a tiny sliver of humanity to him that prevents him from being 100% evil all the time. The novel also starts off really strong. The way Follett introduces the main characters really makes them sympathetic and, much like Follett’s best characters, you really want to root for their success. I was very emotionally invested in Kit, a poor little boy sent to work in a manor house after a family tragedy; Amos, a good-natured boy who inherits his father’s business only to find himself deep in debt to the meanest businessman in town; and Sal, a grieving widow desperate to care for her child.
The problem is that these compelling set-ups are resolved so quickly that they barely factor into the broader narrative. The Armor of Light follows its cast of characters and the historical events that surround them from 1792 until 1825, and while this is not Follett’s first Kingbridge novel to span such an extended period, the gaps between the chapters and sections here are jarring. Unlike Pillars of the Earth, which comprises over a thousand pages of dense text, The Armor of Light aims to cover even more historical ground and a larger cast of characters in 737 well-spaced pages. While it may seem absurd to suggest that a 700+ page novel wasn’t long enough, given Follett’s ambition, The Armor of Light left me feeling at several points as though whole chapters were cut in the edit. For example, the problem of Amos’s debt is ultimately resolved by a one-liner that basically equates to “a few years passed, business was good, and he paid it off.” Needless to say, I did not find this at all satisfying and the characters all felt distant as a result.
The historical period covered in The Armor of Light is, admittedly, also not my favorite. The way some readers may complain about Follett’s descriptions of cathedral architecture in The Pillars of the Earth is how I felt about the description of spinning looms and labor union politics in this novel. I have heard Follett say in interviews that he tries never to deliver information or historical context in more than one or two sentences at a time. He seems to have forgotten that here. There are historical information dumps or descriptions of new technology that go on way too long in The Armor of Light. The Battle of Waterloo was particularly egregious on this front. On a whole, the entire Napoleon/Waterloo subplot felt unnecessary and did not fit the rest of the novel’s tone at all. The way Follett handled this particular subplot reminded me of the way he approached historical fiction in the Century Trilogy, where, for some reason, Follett insists on shoving his characters in front of history’s most iconic figures and into its most infamous battles even when it makes no sense for them to be there. What I enjoyed so much about Pillars of the Earth, World Without End, and The Evening and the Morning was that history was merely a backdrop against which we got to see a character-driven soap opera play out, not the other way around where characters become mouthpieces for describing history’s greatest hits. I stand by the hunch I had in my review of The Evening and the Morning: Follett’s style is far better suited to pre-modern historical periods.
And of course, I cannot review a Ken Follett historical novel without noting that many of the author’s signature narrative and character tropes are on full display here… again. The “extramarital affair resulting in an unplanned pregnancy” trope is center stage in The Armor of Light. It happens twice and both times, I saw it coming from a mile away. And neither time did it result in any particularly compelling drama for the the characters involved. Again, there is no problem in this novel that a five-year time jump cannot solve. Yet, no matter the character’s age or the year, you can always rely on Follett to ensure they are almost all as horny as rabbits.
At the end of the day, I’m never going to pick up a Kingsbridge novel and not have fun with it. These novels are ultimately just soap operas aimed at history dudes, and once you accept that Ken Follett’s version of industrial England and the French Revolution isn’t trying to rival Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo, the happier you’ll be.
The Once and Future Lit 