The Armor of Light is the latest beast of a book by Ken Follett set in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, England. It is amazing how quickly he churns out these books! As I suggested in my review of the last novel in the Kingsbridge series, The Evening and the Morning, if you like historical fiction and have not yet read any of Follett’s historical novels, I highly recommend that you rectify that situation and read the Kingsbridge series.

While The Evening and the Morning is a prequel to the first Kingsbridge novel, The Pillars of the Earth, The Armor of Light is a sequel that spans the years 1792-1824. These are the early years of the industrial revolution in England and the years of the Napoleonic wars on continental Europe. I learn so much about history from Follett’s novels. For example, I had no idea that the US invaded (or tried to invade) Canada in 1812 when the British pissed off the Americans by kidnapping American sailors and forcing them to serve in the British navy. I do not even want to imagine what it would have been like if the Americans and the British had not signed a peace treaty just a couple of years later.

The main characters of The Armor of Light are the fictional mill owners in Kingsbridge and the “hands” that work for them. The Church does not play a huge role in The Armor of Light, unlike previous Kingsbridge novels, and the Big Bad is not a clergyman this time, instead he is an Alderman named Joseph Hornbeam. Hornbeam is one of the richest mill owners in Kingsbridge and he has a personal vendetta against the poor millworkers. The novel covers the formation of unions in England and how the millworkers learned to strike for better working conditions and better wages, until the government passed legislation that made unions and striking illegal (this really happened). I found it funny reading this novel and reflecting how society seems to be regressing back to this time when the common man had no rights and their lives were dictated to them by rich, powerful people. The Combination Act is akin to legislation being passed today in the US and the UK, for example, that restricts people’s right to protest.

The novel also covers the rise of Methodism and how the Methodists broke off from the Church of England, the affect of the Napoleonic wars on industry in England and the cost of goods, the use of “press gangs” to fill out the British navy, the rise of Luddites who destroyed machinery in cotton mills because they believed machines were threatening their jobs, and the infamous battle at Waterloo where Napoleon was finally defeated for good (I really hope mentioning a major military event that happened over two hundred years ago is not a spoiler).

The Armor of Light is just a formulaic as Follett’s other novels. You can spot romances and plot twists coming from miles away, but it is such an interesting novel and enjoyable to read. It is a novel that will have you pondering morality and law; it makes you realize how far we have come as a society, but also how we have not come far enough at all.