A place called freedom

Ken Follett imagines finding a box buried in the garden of the house where he has just moved. Inside, engraved on a collar, he discovers this inscription:

From this opening, reminiscent of the discovery of buried treasure, begins a tale that aspires to be historical and social, in the vein of Émile Zola, but quickly degenerates into a potboiler. We are in mid-eighteenth-century England, though the exploitation of the iron and coal deposits of the "Black Country" in the English West Midlands had already begun by the mid-sixteenth century. Working conditions were brutal, owing to rudimentary mining techniques and the greed of the masters, to whom the miners were even bound by seven-year indentures. Men, women, and children descended into the depths of the earth; casualties were numerous and frequent, caused chiefly by explosions resulting from gas leaks. The miners were left with nothing but dreams of freedom in a life beyond this world.

. In these words lie both resignation and redemption, an unshakeable will toward freedom. And it is this very will that impels Mack, a young and charismatic miner, to place himself at the head of his people. Within the nascent bourgeoisie, too, stir impulses toward freedom, though viewed more as an impatience with rigid social codes than as an awareness of the brutish exploitation of the people. Lizzie belongs to a once-affluent, now-impoverished family: she could marry one of the young Jamissons because she is pretty and well-mannered—if overly independent—and, above all, because she owns land particularly rich in coal. This Lizzie is a peculiar character: she likes wearing men's clothes so she can move about more freely, rides astride like a man, and seeks to understand the life of the miners; moreover, she is drawn to Mack's magnetism, to the aura he exudes:

. Lizzie refuses to acknowledge her passion for Mack, even when she descends into the mines and sees the young man at work—untamed and strong, saving lives during a gas explosion; when she admires him for his courage in demanding better working conditions; and when, at last, she sees him emerge naked from the cold waters of the stream during his flight to London. It takes time for Lizzie to recognize her love for Mack, and with it, her own desire for freedom. She will marry one of the two young Jamissons—a mendacious, soft, and obtuse man—and travel with him to Virginia to a coffee plantation, where she will once again cross paths with Mack, transported as a slave from England; and it is with him that she will ultimately find freedom in the Wild West.

One cannot help but wonder what Ken Follett truly means by freedom: the independent, transgressive ways of a young bourgeois woman—aspirations closer to our own era than to anything a young woman in sixteenth-century England could have conceived—or the emancipation of a people setting out on the path toward working-class rights and social justice? Considering that the author is a Labour Party sympathizer, the novel bears subtle witness to the devolution of socialist thought: from a working-class movement to left-wing liberalism. Where is freedom to be found? Only in the Wild West, far from the bourgeois constraints of society. Would it not have been better to delve deeper into the social and individual realities of an emerging working-class world within the mining and metallurgical industries, which were to play a decisive role in the Industrial Revolution and the birth of class consciousness?

Written, as with all his fiction, in fine, elegant English enriched by period slang, and carried by an intricate, at times gripping plot (such as Lizzie's descent into the mines), the novel nevertheless displays Ken Follett's customary shortcomings: too many overlapping storylines (the exploitation of the miners, the struggle of the London dockers, slavery, and the American colonists' yearning for independence) and thinly developed characters, particularly Lizzie, who is meant to be the linchpin of the entire narrative. What longing one feels for Jane Austen's heroines!

Why read it? It is an easy read, even if, ultimately, it proves flat and long-winded.