9/27/23
Newsletter #471
The Crack of Dawn
In 1904 Charles Rolls was introduced to Henry Royce in Manchester, England. Henry Royce was already building very early automobiles (one at a time). Charles Rolls was from a very wealthy family. He was an early automobile and flying enthusiast (first flying balloons), who in 1896, at the age of 18, travelled to Paris and bought his first car, a Peugeot Phaeton. Rolls then purchased the exclusive right to sell Peugeot cars in England and opened England’s very first car dealership. In 1904 Rolls and Royce went into business together, formed Rolls Royce, Ltd., then began selling a two-cylinder, 10 horsepower car that was quickly considered one of the most dependable, attractive, well-designed early automobiles.
In 1908, when nobody in America would take their invention seriously, Orville and Wilbur Wright brought their airplane to England, where they were taken very seriously. Charles Rolls became the second British person in history to ever fly in an airplane (piloted by Wilbur Wright). Immediately, Rolls purchased one of the very first Wright Flyers. He quickly piloted over 200 flights, including the very first eastbound crossing of the English Channel, as well as the first double-crossing of the Channel, both in 1910. On July 12, 1910, Charles Rolls earned the dubious honor of being the very first British person killed in an airplane crash. He was 32 years old.
Having pre-ordered the book a month ago, I received The Armor of Light yesterday. The Armor of Light is the fifth book in Ken Follett’s Knightsbridge series, also known as The Pillars of the Earth series.
Oddly, I think, for the first 30 years of my life I read primarily fiction (with a non-fiction book thrown in maybe every ten books). For the following 35 years I have read almost exclusively non-fiction. My first three published books are all nonfiction. But for more than a decade, most of what I’ve written has been historical fiction. In fact, I have now published my first work of historical fiction, Hitler in the Madhouse (Amazon.com: Hitler in the Madhouse: A Novel: 9798988928508: Becker, Josh, Sanborn, Craig "Kif": Books), which is 90% true. Nobody knows what happened to Adolf Hitler in the madhouse, so I had to make it up.
Anyway, Ken Follett’s Knightsbridge series is the only fiction I’ve read in a long time, and the first book, The Pillars of the Earth (1989), is really exceptional, and also Follett’s biggest seller of his 38 books, most of which are thrillers like, Eye of the Needle. Interestingly, I think, is how the series works. All of the stories take place in the same English town of Knightsbridge, and all of the stories are 200 years apart. The first book begins in 1150, and Follett does a truly masterful job of putting us into that time extremely unfamiliar time period. All of these books are huge. Pillars is about 1,000-pages. The main plot, among several, is the character Tom Builder (your profession was your name back then) moving to Knightsbridge with his family and dreaming of building a beautiful cathedral where the old, decrepit church sits decomposing. Ken Follett then takes you through all of the steps of building a big cathedral in 1150, when they don’t even have paper. Tom scratches his plans onto stone with a stone. And over 1,000 years later many of these cathedrals are still standing and are beautiful.
Using the 200-year increments, the second book, World Without End (2007, written eighteen years after the first book), takes place in 1350, and is the story of when the actual Knights Bridge was built. Though not quite to the level of the first book, the second book is still great. The third book, A Column of Fire (2017, written ten years later), takes place in 1550, and is the weakest book of three, though still fascinating. The fourth book, The Evening and the Morning (2020), coming damn near right on the heels of the previous book at only three years, was a stroke of brilliance. Instead of moving 200 years forward, Ken Follett went 200 backward from the first one, putting him in 950. This gave him the ability to put us into an even more unfamiliar setting and tell a thrilling Viking story.
So now with this new fifth book, The Armor of Light, he’s moving forward again. This one is set in the 1700s. I started it yesterday and he’s already got me hooked. I now have a big, long, luxurious ride before me. The only possible downside would be if this enormous book fell off the couch and crushed my cat.
I often feel like Steve McQueen at the very end of Papillion (1973). He’s an old man having just escaped Devil’s Island and is floating on a bag of coconuts. He yells at the heavens, “I’m still here, Goddammit!” and the camera pulls back, then just keeps pulling back farther and farther and farther . . .
To get that shot back in 1973, they had to put Steve McQueen on a bag of coconuts in the middle of the ocean, then get their boats way the fuck out of the way so they could keep pulling back from a helicopter. You can see the chopper’s prop wash on the ocean at the very beginning of the shot. However, at a point, Steve McQueen was really and truly all by himself on nothing but a stinking bag of coconuts way the hell out in the middle of the ocean. It’s not a visual effect; it’s pure guts on the part of McQueen. It’s spectacular.
It won’t be dawn for at least two hours yet, but at least I made it to another day.