Follett’s Lie Down with Lions is a novel built around two central ideas: the first a love triangle between a woman and two spies on opposite sides of the Cold War, the second a tense chase across mountains. Written in 1985, Follett sets the story in the Panjshir Valley of Afghanistan, during the Mujahideen rebellion against the Soviet backed Afghan regime, a war that came to be seen as the Soviet Union’s Vietnam War. The love triangle is between Jane, an English nurse, Ellis (a CIA operative) and Jean-Pierre, a Frenchman who is with the KGB.
This is the kind of book you should borrow, not buy. It is never dull. The plot drives forward relentlessly, and there’s always another scheme, another death, another threat. It has all the violence and sex you need to be entertained, and the final chase through the mountains of Afghanistan is tense beyond belief. The problem is that the story has little else to recommend it. It is a book built solely upon its premise, and hence the characters act with little logic other than to advance plot, and the love triangle is particularly impossible to enjoy.
Jane’s love for both main characters is never really explored. Ellis’s motivations are clear, but Jean-Pierre’s murky. The story does tell us why Jane is drawn to each man, and why Jean-Pierre spies for Russia, but it doesn’t really show it very often. Rather, when Jean-Pierre questions his loyalties, we are reminded that his father was a left-wing fighter for the French Resistance who ended up being executed for espionage. But at no other time does he care much about his father, so his motivations don’t ring true. The same problem pervades Jane’s rapid swings in attitudes between her lovers, and Jean-Pierre’s bizarre changes in character. They are given explicit reasons, but the reasons are told once rather than shown throughout, forced-fed to an unwilling reader who doesn’t really believe that any of these dramatic swings are happening. Except plot.
Without character there is no good plot. We’re not really that invested in Jean-Pierre or Jane, so their love doesn’t really draw us along. Once we’ve suffered the whiplash of the plot twists, the reader doesn’t know what to think anymore. There is also a lot of graphic sex in this novel, pages of it that are definitely gratuitous, as the relationship isn’t built up enough for us to feel the love or passion behind the sex. The sex is just there, and it goes on and on and on.
But the weakest thing about this novel is its lack of weight. Follett’s best stories, such as his Kingsbridge novels, Never or Triple, are stories not just about their characters, but also about a place or a time. Lie Down with Lions doesn’t get us invested in the Afghani conflict at all. It has nothing much to say about it. We are shown Afghanistan, but we aren’t really led to care about any of it. In the end, it’s just a backdrop for a love story that ends in a chase. That’s entertainment, but it isn’t art.
Wet Broken Things 