Jackdaws by Ken Follett
Genres: Suspense Fiction, Historical Fiction
Published by Dutton Adult on 2001 December 3
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 451
I only occasionally read historical fiction1. However, a new friend spoke well of Ken Follet so I grabbed a sampling of his books from our public library to try. I started with Jackdaws which is set in 1944, primarily in Nazi-occupied France. It turned out to be an excellent read, and the only thing preventing me from reading it in one sitting yesterday was that I had other things I had to get done2.
Turns out, Jackdaws was a great first choice for me. A fast way to win my involvement is to make your protagonist a woman who is tough and intelligent and still has real emotions, particularly compassion. Flick is definitely that kind of character3,4. When she’s tough and necessarily ruthless, it is because she has to be. The rest of the time, she’s as human as the rest of us. She laughs, she cries, her emotions sometimes lead her off course, and she makes mistakes. A real person in extraordinary circumstances.
That holds true for the majority of other characters also, including the antagonist. He too is a real person in extraordinary circumstances. We may not approve of his methods, his choice of who to serve in the war, but he does have real reasons for what he does throughout the book. At times, you can almost empathize with the antagonist, …except that his methods are horrible enough that I really can’t feel sorry for him. Eerrgh.
I had a fear that the book would be exposition heavy, but I was proven wrong about that. It seemed a little slow at the start, but I was hooked early enough that there was no difficulty reading along until the pace picked up. By then I was completely immersed and the book kept me motivated to keep reading all the way to the end.
There is graphic violence and depictions of torture in this book. However, they are not over-lavish or excessive. Follet doesn’t sugar coat the kinds of things that happened to people during the war…some of the characters do horrible things…but Follet spends only enough time on the scene so that the reader has a sense of what is happening. I imagine that was a difficult balancing act during the editing phase…
Overall, a great book, well-written, well-plotted, and well-executed. A couple of “dings” for the slow start and simply because I have trouble saying “I loved it” and remembering the torture at the same time.
- If anything, I lean more toward “what if” historical fiction which goes hand in hand with time travel and alternate universe fiction. 🙂 ↩
- For example, making peanut butter cookies. I still haven’t made them yet… ↩
- Which of course makes her beautiful in my head (being described as pretty is merely incidental). In fact, if Follet had added ‘smartass’ to her list of descriptors, I’d be in my time machine tracking her down instead of writing in this blog. Her being a smartass wouldn’t have fit the overall tone of the novel, though. ↩
- Of course I have a time machine. You mean there’s geeks that don’t? ;). Okay. Fine. Just find me a real world analog and watch me swoon. ↩