Who knew that eyebrows could be quite so critical? Ken Follett’s magnificent arches twitch and rise whenever I say something he doesn’t like or agree with, which seems to be every time I open my mouth. A Leftie Follett may be but his eyebrows are pure Norman Lamont. It’s the smile that accompanies these movements that does it. Combined with the eyebrows, you are made to feel as if you are wasting his time. Which I suppose I am. I have had to move this interview due to a stomach bug and I get the impression that the one-time darling of New Labour is put out. This afternoon the multimillionaire catches a flight to Paris for the start of a three-month book tour and I feel like an inconvenience to the man.
“Are you getting a private jet?” I ask, remembering a long-ago interview in which he mentioned a desire for one. “No,” he says, raising the Follett follicles. “It’s one of the few things I can’t afford.” What are the other things, I wonder? “It’s hard to think of anything else,” he says.
We meet at his office in Stevenage. His wife, Barbara, was until the small matter of the expenses scandal the Labour MP here, stepping down before the last election. This is home, he says. Well, up to a point, I think. He also has a place in Antigua, and one in London, though he has long since sold the Cheyne Walk pad in which he used to host parties for the likes of Tony and Cherie in the early 1990s, before it all went sour (but more of that later). He has also got rid of the place in Cape Town. I suppose that we are living in an age of austerity now and Follett agrees that three homes is “plenty”. Anyway, they have stayed in the constituency because “we’re pretty committed to Stevenage. We like it here, we’re part of the town’s life and we’re still part of the Labour Party here.” Without wanting to come across as a crashing snob, Stevenage does not strike me as a place for people who hanker, realistically at least, after private jets. In the taxi over, the driver bemoans the suicide rate, the lack of jobs, the fact that “all the employment seems to go to the Asians”. He doesn’t know where Ken’s office is — The Follett Office, as it is called — but we soon find it, on something resembling an industrial estate, alerted to its presence by the huge, gleaming Bentley parked outside.
As Follett is a novelist, I had expected his office to be small. But this is my first mistake: Follett is not just a novelist, he is a multimillion-pound business. He employs a staff of 16 “for keeping track of the money”. The other reason he needs the staff is to keep track of his many appointments. “I do these interviews all over the world,” he says, as if underlining my status as a mere minion. He wants Barbara to come and manage the business for a bit. Indeed, on her website she says she will soon take up the position of “chief executive officer” there, which makes it sound as if she is going to run BP. Anyway, the office is lined with copies of Follett’s novels that sell millions across the globe. His biggest market is America (30 million copies so far) but the Germans are catching up. “It’s great that in the German language, I’ve sold almost 30 million books. Isn’t that amazing?” He is right. It is. His latest, Fall of Giants, is almost 900 pages long, the first novel in a trilogy that will span the 20th century.
Follett is undeniably good at what he does; his books are gripping page-turners that somehow catapult you through hundreds of pages without quite realising it. I am even admiring of his ambition — he says that this has got to be No 1 in America, Germany, Italy and Spain, and that he has to make the New York Times best-seller list. I suppose we should admire his honesty.
He suggests that people should give Wolf Hall, the Booker prize-winning novel by Hilary Mantel, “to the Labour Party jumble sale — I hated it”. He has similar venom for J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (also a winner of the Booker prize) calling it “very poor terrible”. I quite liked it, I remark. Why, he asks? I just did, I say, the will to communicate draining slowly from my body.
Perhaps he will be more forthcoming about politics.
What does he think of the Coalition? “I don’t know. It’s early days.” Where does he think it went wrong for Labour? “You know, I don’t think I really want to talk about politics,” he snaps. “I want to talk about my book, not my politics.” I try again. Has he read Tony Blair’s A Journey? “No,” he says, curtly. Will he? “No.”
Why? “Because I suspect a lot of it won’t be true.”
Ken Follett: perhaps the only person to make you feel a twinge of sympathy towards Tony Blair.
