Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)It's unfortunate that one of the previous reviewers found so much to hate in "Lie Down With Lions," and I'm guessing it's because that reader was looking for the wrong things. No, Follett's not Faulkner, and you'll get no musings on the human condition. But that's not why one reads Follett; you read Follett for the tightly written, superbly constructed thriller, and, in "Lie Down With Lions," that's exactly what you get.
The action is intense, right from the outset, where American agent Ellis blows his cover in Paris, losing in the process his girlfriend Jane, who takes up with another guy and heads with him to Afghanistan, to offer medical assistance to a populace wearied by war against the invading Soviets (sort of a 1980s version of Médecins sans frontières). Ellis tails her there, under the auspices of the US government, to train the Afghan fighters. At which point, the plot thickens, and doesn't let up till the very end.
The dynamics of the Ellis/Jane relationship are great, very natural and well drawn in a way one doesn't usually find such relationships drawn in action novels. Their moments of greatest intimacy--including an amazingly and erotically written love scene that rivals anything in Miller or Joyce--help drive one of the novel's main tensions, a tension between the reader's responses to these two characters who are often at odds but both very sympathetic. This tension, though, merely underscores the real, action-based tension surrounding the military skirmishes taking place on the greater stage outside the Ellis/Jane relationship.
As some reviewers have pointed out, "Lie Down With Lions" isn't much use as a history primer on the war in Afghanistan, or as a probing meditation on the nature of existence. But that's really beside the point. We read Follett, like we read Clancy and Grisham, because they're amazingly talented story tellers with interesting stories to tell. I've read "Lie Down With Lions" three times and enjoyed it immensely each time.
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