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Popular Culture Review
foremost contemporary writers of international intrigue. But this was also a
period of some restiveness for the writer, who moved to the south of France in
1979. The following year, 1980, he told an interviewer that he didn’t expect to
be writing thrillers for the rest of his life and that he’d been developing a film
treatment of The Key to Rebecca (Isenberg 5). Then, in 1981, the same year that
he returned to England from the south of France, he agreed to write a nonfiction
account of a daring rescue mission to Iran, in part because it represented a break
from novels (Lauerman 1). The next year, he moved from London to Surrey and
became press officer of the local branch of the Labour Party where he met the
woman who would become his second wife, Barbara Broer, the widow of a slain
South African civil rights activist. Follett continued to search for his next
project. He spent much of 1983 working on a thriller titled “Country Risk” about
a KGB plot to take over a bank and force a financial crisis, but abandoned it
during the time when he was separating from his first wife—a connection noted
by an interviewer for Salon (7). While living with Broer, Follett started work on
Lie Down with Lions, a story about two people with a small child escaping over
the Himalayas during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and placed a strong
female character at the center of the story—one whom Follett has said bears a
close resemblance to Broer, or at least the person he first thought she was
(Turner 5).
Lie Down with Lions describes a romantic triangle comprised of Jane, a
liberal Englishwoman in Paris who wants to help Afghan children; her French
admirer, Jean-Pierre; and her American lover, Ellis, who works for the CIA.
When Jean-Pierre reveals to Jane that Ellis works for a clandestine organization,
she feels betrayed and departs Paris for Afghanistan with Jean-Pierre, who is
supposedly an idealistic medical volunteer. Later, in Afghanistan, after bearing a
child, Jane feels doubly betrayed when she discovers that Jean-Pierre is aiding
the Russians in their struggle against the Afghan resistance. Ellis, who has gone
to Afghanistan to support a leader of the rebellion, now helps Jane and her
daughter flee both the pursuing Russians and Jean-Pierre in a daring escape from
the Peshawar Valley.
As with Follett’s other mid-career novels, he began first with a carefully
constructed outline, completing it in late 1983 under the preliminary title Run on
Ice. He then solicited comments from readers at his British and American
publishers and from his trusted friend and agent, A1 Zuckerman. This had
become Follett’s standard procedure since Eye o f the Needle, the first of his
books which was carefully outlined and researched, and he sought additional
insights and commentary from professionals in the publishing world throughout
the stages of writing Lie Down with Lions—after second and third draft outlines,
and after three drafts of the novel itself.
What was different about Lie Down with Lions as a mid-career novel,
however, was that for the first time since his earliest flawed novels, Follett had
selected a contemporary setting—a change noted by Elaine Koster at New
American Library in her response to Follett’s first draft outline: