L’arte di Ken Follett è semplice e risiede nella sua incredibile capacità di rendere credibili le storie ambientate nella storia. Il suo ultimo romanzo, “Le armi della luce”, è ambientato in un piccolo paese dell’Inghilterra, Kingsbridge, alla fine del diciottesimo secolo, all’alba della rivoluzione dell’industria tessile che sconvolse la vita della gente. Nel romanzo si incrociano storie di famiglie, ricchi e poveri, vincenti e perdenti, buoni e cattivi e il risultato è, al solito, un libro che non vedi l’ora di prendere in mano. Ken Follett sa come appassionare il lettore. I protagonisti del libro sono tanti: Sal, una donna che prende la vita di petto, che affronta la morte del marito per un capriccio del signorotto di paese, Will Riddick, con enorme dignità e cresce il piccolo Kit anche dopo l’esilio dal paese di origine senza mai arretrare di fronte alle ingiustizie. E lo stesso Kit che da orfano di padre affronta con caparbietà il lavoro fino a diventare un tecnico delle macchine tessitrici e un produttore delle stesse con Roger Riddick, il fratello di Will. E Amos, un imprenditore tessile che applica alle sue industrie la cultura dell’umanità, a differenza del suo più celebre collega, Hornbeam, che ha sempre utilizzato le armi della violenza e della sopraffazione per far crescere la sua industria. E poi Spade, il riformatore, l’uomo che cerca di mediare tra le richieste degli operai che perdono il lavoro per l’introduzione delle macchine e le istanze dei produttori. E sullo sfondo la guerra con la Francia, lo spettro di Napoleone per i ricchi, la speranza di un futuro possibile per gli altri. Un romanzo denso di storie, di episodi che si fa leggere tutto di un fiato. Insomma, un altro romanzo di Ken Follett. ( )

Le debut des syndicats en Angleterre et la bataille de Waterloo ( )

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS
-PRINT: ©September 26, 2023; 978-0525954996; Viking; 752 pp.; unabridged
-DIGITAL: ©September 26, 2023; Viking; 750 pp.; unabridged
- *Audio: ©September 26, 2023; Penguin Audio; 21:39:00; unabridged
-FILM: No

SERIES: Kingsbridge # 5. (Goodreads shows this as #4. It is not.)

CHARACTERS: (not comprehensive)
Sal Clitheroe – Weaver; Young mother of a small child
Christopher (Kit) Clitheroe – Sal’s son
Harry Clitheroe – Sal’s Husband
Ike Clitheroe – Sal’s brother-in-law
Sarah - Sal's Aunt
Alec Pollock – Barber-surgeon
George Box – Member of the Society of Friends
Joan Box – Member of the Society of Friends
George Riddick – Squire of Badford
Will Riddick – Eldest son of the squire of Badford
Roger Riddick – Youngest son of the squire of Badford
Henry Northwood – A viscount and colonel
Jane Midwinter – Daughter of the Methodist Canon
Charles Midwinter – Methodist Canon; Jane’s father
Arabella Latimer – Bishop’s wife
Elsie Latimer – Bishop’s daughter
David (Spade) Shoveller – A weaver
Amos Barrowfield – Son of a clothier
Obadiah Bradford – A clothier; Amos’s father
? Hornbeam – A Clothier
Harold Hornbeam – Mr. Hornbeam’s son
Debra Hornbeam – Mr. Hornbeam’s daughter

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: I enjoy this Kingsbridge series. Don is getting a little weary of the fact that one’s favorite characters are often subjected to horrendous treatment, and I probably have to agree, but the characters and the plots are so spellbinding that I just couldn’t NOT read (listen) to a new addition the moment it’s out.
-ABOUT: It’s turnip harvest and young, reckless, Will Reddick who is in charge, insists on the harvesters prodding an overburdened horse and cart up a hill. This leads, predictably to tragedy and the event causes Sal Clitheroe and her young son, Kit, being thrown into new circumstances, to figure out how to fend for themselves.
But Will isn’t finished causing this family hardship, and we endure much with them before they are forced to move from Badford to Kingsbridge and begin to forge a path ahead.
We become familiar with their new community, which isn’t far enough away from the reach of Will to keep them out of harms way, but strength and character grow, and there’s an entire cast of characters to grow fond of, with a few dangerous exceptions.
-OVERALL IMPRESSION: I loved learning about the early clothier business—weavers, scribblers, looms, wool; Also the embodiment of employers and workers as they scrabble over the adoption of technological advancements that will, in time, cost the employer less, and the employees their jobs.
AUTHOR: Ken Follett (June 5, 1949). Excerpt from Wikipedia: “[Ken] is a Welsh-born author of thrillers and historical novels who has sold more than 160 million copies of his works.[3] Many of his books have achieved high ranking on best seller lists. For example, in the US, many reached the number 1 position on the New York Times Best Seller list, including Edge of Eternity, Fall of Giants, A Dangerous Fortune, The Key to Rebecca, Lie Down with Lions, Triple, Winter of the World, and World Without End.[4]”

NARRATOR: John Lee Excerpt from Wikipedia: “John Rafter Lee is an English actor, narrator, playwright and producer.
Lee was born in England with Irish ancestry.[1] His father worked as a carpenter and other men in his family were blacksmiths, brick layers and plumbers.[1] Lee himself has worked in agriculture, picking fruit, which he considers much more difficult than voice acting.[1]
Lee has narrated hundreds of audiobooks.[1] "His trademark rich, smooth voice with its hint of a growl turns the word into a seduction", according to AudioFile.[1] He has won numerous Audie Awards and AudioFile Earphones Awards, and he was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile in 2009.[1]

In film, he portrayed the mysterious Trevor Goodchild in Peter Chung's Æon Flux. Other voice credits include Meier Link in both Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust and Vampire Hunter D, Pavlo Zaitsev in episode 16 of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Jason Wynn in HBO's Spawn animated series, and Aristotle in Reign: The Conqueror. John also had a role as a voice actor playing Cid Bunansa in the video game Final Fantasy XII.

Lee was also the producer and screenwriter for the 2001 film Breathing Hard, in which he played the character John Duggan. His Æon Flux co-star Denise Poirier plays his wife Carol.

He has written the plays Blood and Milk, Hitler's Head, Passchendaele, Clean Souls and Frankincense. He has adapted into English Schiller's Don Carlos, Racine's Britannicus and Grabbe's Jest, Satire, Irony and Deeper Significance. Passchendaele received its first production at the New York Fringe Festival in August 2010.

His latest film, which he wrote and co-produced, is Forfeit, which received its premier at the 2007 South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. He is currently writing a film to be shot in his hometown, Birmingham, England.”

*As always, John Lee’s narration is superb!

GENRE: Historical Fiction

LOCATIONS: Badford, England; Kingsbridge, England; Brussels, France; Paris, France

TIME FRAME: 18th Century; 19th Century

SUBJECTS: Trade Unions; Clothiers; Weavers; Technology; Workers replaced by technology; Politics; Women in society; War; Militia; Religion; Methodists; Church of England; Anglicans; Battle of Waterloo

DEDICATION:
“This book is dedicated to the historians.
There are many thousands of them all over the world.
Some sit in libraries, hunched over ancient manuscripts, trying to understand dead languages in mysterious hieroglyphs. Others kneel on the ground sifting earth on the sites of ruined buildings, seeking fragments from lost government papers dealing with long-forgotten political crises. They are relentless in their search for the truth.
Without them we would not understand where we come from. And that would make it even more difficult to figure out where we're going.”

SAMPLE QUOTATION: Excerpt From chapter 2
“Amos Barrowfield realized something was wrong as soon as he came within sight of Badford.
There were men working in the fields, but not as many as he expected. The road into the village was deserted but for an empty cart. He did not even see any dogs.
Amos was a clothier, or ‘putter-out.’ To be exact, his father was the clothier; but Obidiah was fifty and often breathless, and it was Amos who traveled the countryside, leading a string of packhorses, visiting cottages. The horses carried sacks of raw wool, the sheared fleece of sheep.
The work of transforming fleece into cotton was done mainly by villagers working in their homes. First the fleece had to be untangled and cleaned, and this was called scribbling or carding. Then it was spun into long strings of yarn and wound onto bobbins. Finally the strings were woven on a loom and became strips of cloth a yard wide. Cloth was the main industry in the West of England, and Kingsbridge was at its center.
Amos imagined that Adam and Eve, after they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, must have done these different jobs themselves, in order to make clothes and cover their nakedness; although the Bible did not say much about scribbling and spinning, not about how Adam might have built his loom.”

RATING: 5 stars.

STARTED-FINISHED 9/28/2023-10/7/2023

(Serendipitous Connections: I love how my readings, watchings, and daily activities often seem somewhat inter-connected, usually in a mundane, but nevertheless, noticeable way, in that they repeat words, names, or circumstances within a very short time-span. So I have decided to start listing those that occur with the books I am reading, that I can recall: 1. The book by Mick Herron, "Down Cemetery Lane", that we read (listened to) just before this one, also had a main character named 'Amos'. There it was Amos Crane and he was a "bad" person, here it is Amos Barrowfield who is a "good" character. 2. The Endeavor episode we watched just after finishing this book, also had a character, Mr. Box (in the Endeavour episode it is a minor character, here, it is George, a main character). 3. Both that episode and this book also share the saying "Quicker than you can say knife," which is probably a common British saying, and I've heard the "Quicker than you can say" part before, just not "knife".) ( )

Love this book like all the others in the Kingsbridge series, despite it being outside the main historical period I'm interested in, the middle ages. There isn't much connection to characters from the previous books in the series, no descendants or anything. The location of Kingsbridge, the cathedral, the monument the prior Philip and a couple of other buildings are the only references or connections. It was definitely a page turner and I couldn't put it down. I read in 4 days, while on holiday mind you. The couple of chapters about the battle of Waterloo were the least interesting to me. I'm not that into battles (funny as next I'm reading a trilogy about the start of the hundred years war). Interesting to realize the location of Waterloo was nothing of significance, barely a dot on the map, before the battle. I enjoyed the placing of the story at the start of the industrial revolution, using the textile industry to show the shift from the different stages of the process being done solely by hand in individuals home to machines in factories operated by less individual but producing more. And the workers fight to save their jobs, but "progress" always winning in the end. It reminds me a lot about the self checkout debates going on right now. Some people don't want to introduce new technologies if people are going to loss jobs. ( )

I don't know, it was for sure better than The Evening and The Morning. as in far that Follett didn't try to fill pages with senseless smut and violence when he had no idea how to bring the story forward.
On the other hand, it was again same old same old. The upstarter from the peasant class who makes his way despite all the hurdles that are thrown in his way, the middle class characters that were always in love with each other but they didn't find to each other until their golden years of live, and yes, the villain from the noble class, even though here he was only really part of the story in the first half, and not very good developed at that as well.
Which brings us to one of the major flaws, the whole story felt not very well developed, not round and smooth, it felt "too clean" not gritty and dirty, more like a cheap tv movie set with no speck of dust, and with surprisingly mediocre writing.
I had hoped that Waterloo would be the saving grace for this otherwise boring story but alas it wasn't so. On the contrary, I was surprised by how lacklustre Follett wrote about the battles on the continent, be it Spain or Netherlands.
Sure it is one of the most famous battles in European history, but I was surprised that none of the characters played an important role in it and were only bystanders or observers. I mean, I don't recall that Follett had problems before in adding a little bit of made up story to his historic events, so why start now? (Just think about how bad ass heroic Kit and Roger could have been if they would have thrown together a last minute engineering masterpiece to help out the 107 foot?)
Let's see if there will be a last instalment that brings Kingsbridge into the present time ... following his pattern it should be another smut fest again ;-) ( )