A Place Called Freedom

A Place Called Freedom by Ken Follett, 1995. Crown. 405 pp.

A Place Called Freedom. The title alone gets the imagination going, somewhere perhaps only the mind will ever find. There are as many ideals of freedom as there are forms of bondage. Best-selling author Ken Follett's novel tells the story of two different lives each a victim of bondage inherited by birth, one physical fraught with pain and the other emotional, the kind that is bred in for generations. Each of them desperate to escape.

The novel begins in the hills of Scotland, mid 1700's. "The high mountain sides, the quiet mysterious woods and the laughing water formed a landscape familiar to his soul." This was High Glen, home of Lizzie, the high-spirited daughter of the widow Lady Hamillim, laird of the estate.

On the other side of the mountain, owned by Sir George Jamisson, where "Engineers had torn great holes in the mountain sides; manmade hills of slag disfigured the valley; massive wagons loaded with coal plowed the muddy roads; and the stream was black with dust." This was the world of Mack McAsh. Pledged by his parents at his christening, to labor in Sir Jamisson's coal mines "until he die", for the price of 10 pounds.

The vivid descriptions Follett gives of the conditions in the mines and of the hardships endured by the workers, not just the men who hammered the hard rock for 15 hrs a day, but also the women and children who hauled on their backs, up wooden steps loads of 70 to 150 lbs, creates a world I wish was only an imagination, all the while knowing it was, and to a certain degree is, in existence.

More, subtle are the chains of emotional bondage. They are what hold Lizzie in a world of aristocratic marriage and family duty. Her mind raised to believe in the natural superiority of her class, yet her heart believed in the equal humanity of the miners.

Mack and Lizzie's lives, though vastly different, entwine like strands of a braid, where each time their paths cross, they form a tighter bond, as fate and desire carry them along in their search of freedom, to the land of Virginia, where in 1766 the whispers of revolution, were barely a stir in the air. Mack disembarks from the hull of the ship he has been chained to for six weeks into a world where not only are children born into bondage, but a place where humans are a commodity. Whether they be captives or convicts, orphans or bastards, black or white, Christian or Jew, the slave traders didn't care, they held no prejudice, they would sell any soul unlucky enough to come on the block. And if Lizzie wasn't careful, she could find herself one of those unfortunates. Her father's death left her mother with no choice but to mortgage the High Glen Estate to Sir Jamisson and it was Lizzie's duty to marry one of the Jamisson twins, if she wanted to keep her mother from losing the estate. After Lizzie marries and she reaches America, she finds out just how imprisoned she really is.

Centuries later, a broken iron collar unearthed on a farm called High Glen, in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, gives hope that Mack and Lizzie did find their place called Freedom. Have you found yours?

A Place Called Freedom is action packed and full of adventure, romance and great characters. As primarily a non-fiction reader, I found Mr. Follett’s historical setting both interesting and informative, while some parts I found read like a romance novel. The story moved quickly and I developed a genuine concern for the characters. The novel also gave me a richer perspective of the lives of my ancestors, whose search for freedom has given me mine.