Circle of Days

Ken Follett

FOR almost 5,000 years Stonehenge has passed through different building stages, stood proudly through all weathers, and observed the slings and arrows of British history from its perch on the grassy slopes of Salisbury Plain.

Mystery still surrounds this magnificent edifice, its provenance unknown except that it was built to align with the sun’s rays. But why was it placed exactly there, who constructed it in the form we now see... and how did Bronze Age communities move and handle those giant stones?

It's an ages-old puzzle which master storyteller and bestselling author of the celebrated The Pillars of the Earth series, Ken Follett, tackles with his legendary panache, energy, research and a huge helping of imagination. Circle of Days is expansive world-building on a breathtaking scale as this inventive writer brings not only his version of the past to vivid life but treats us to a story which delights with its earthy evocation of a virtually unknown-to-us Neolithic society and dares to envision how that famous stone circle might have been built.

With a laser focus on a small community – bearing names like Scagga, Cog, Wun, Keff and Olf which Follett (pictured below) must have found fun to invent – readers are plunged into the very basic existence of people who live, love, work the land and utilise the natural resources of this area of Salisbury Plain. The result is an entertaining and richly detailed portrait of men and women forever striving for civilisation’s progress but falling prey to the strife, jealousies and hostilities that are the very essence of being human.

In the year 2000 BC, Seft, his father and two older brothers dig pits and mine for flint, the hardest of all stones which, with its sharp cutting edge, is used for everything from axes to arrowheads to knives, and can be traded for essentials like food, clothing and livestock.

But of all his family, Seft is the only one with an exceptional talent working and using flint… his father and brothers are violent, vulgar brutes who hate him and he dreams of leaving them behind and meeting up again with Neen, the kind girl he met and fell in love with at the Spring Rite, one of the festivals held to celebrate the seasons at an ancient wood-based Monument where the Sun Goddess works her magic. Neen’s family lives in prosperity within the herder community and, as Seft sets out to walk the Great Plain in the high summer heat to trade his stone at the Midsummer Rite and witness the rituals that signal the start of a new year, he hopes an alliance with the girl who left him a parting kiss will offer the escape he so desperately needs.

Meanwhile, Joia, Neen’s younger sister, is a born priestess with a vision and an unmatched ability to lead. As a child, she watches the Midsummer ceremony, enthralled, and dreams of a miraculous new Monument built from the biggest stones to be found in their world. And Joia is already starting to envisage the great stone circle as a grand monument that will last forever and define a civilisation, bringing together the divided tribes of the Plain. It’s a dream that will inspire Seft and become their life’s work.

But trouble is brewing among the hills and woodlands of the Great Plain and when deadly drought ravages the earth, mistrust grows between the herders, farmers and woodlanders until an act of savage violence leads to open warfare between the different communities. With survival now the driving force, will peace and the building of a new stone Monument become just an impossible dream?

Epic is surely the word that best describes this literally monumental tale which runs to 592 pages and colourfully explores how Neolithic society might have functioned… from herders who guard their animals, farmers who work the fertile soil to grow crops, and skilled cleverhands who create and craft, to foraging woodlanders, leather tanners, miners who dig out and fashion flint into tools, and the powerful priestesses who use the sun to mark out the days and seasons, and perform ceremonial rites.

In his trademark attention to detail, Follett also treats readers to imaginative descriptions of the minutae of Bronze Age life as we discover how hide shoes are fashioned, how a rudimentary rope is made to wrap around the giant stones, and how those early craftsmen might have employed their carpentry and stonework skills.

But this is also a living, breathing, and powerfully human story of family, relationships, passion, hatred and intense partisanship as the loyalties of different sections of the community are put to the test and the building of the ancient stone circle, which we now gaze upon with wonder, forms the beating heart of the all the action, drama, heartache, sabotage and natural disasters.

With the sizzling sexual encounters and rituals of a free love society in which marriage is still many centuries away, a unique take on Stonehenge viewed through the eyes of the people who built it, Follett’s gift for making his fiction seem tantalisingly authentic, and a plot that takes in murders, a famine, tribal warfare, and a drought, the distant past has never felt so viscerally alive.
(Quercus, hardback, £25)