Lie Down with Lions

Lie Down with Lions is a 1985 spy novel by Ken Follett. Made into a 1994 TV series, it follows Jane Lambert, an English interpreter living in 1981 Paris, who dates Ellis Thaler, oblivious that he is a spy for the CIA. When Lambert, an idealistic woman who supports pacifism and revolutionary liberation politics, finds out Ellis’s real occupation, she leaves him to date a French doctor, Dr. Jean-Pierre Debout. She decides to follow his career to Afghanistan, where they will ostensibly give medical aid to a village of rebels uniting against the invasive Soviet regime. When she finds that Jean-Pierre is a Soviet spy, she is horrified. When she investigates, she finds that he has been providing medical aid to the rebels while giving the Russians more intel to kill them off. Traumatized and caught in the middle of these two diametrically opposed men who want to kill each other, she tries to reclaim some of her agency and keep them from destroying themselves or each other.

The novel begins in Paris during the last decade of the Cold War. Lambert lives in a small flat and dates Ellis, whom she believes is an American anti-war activist and pacifist who makes money as a writer. Lambert starts the novel confident that she will soon marry Ellis and live a fulfilling life in political activism. One day, he lets slip that he is a covert CIA agent working to collect intelligence on Russian operations in Paris and the rest of Europe. Despite her knowledge that he truly loves her, Lambert is outraged at his deceit and his distorted moral system. She leaves him immediately, itching to restart her life.

After her split from Ellis, Lambert meets Dr. Jean-Pierre Debout, seemingly by chance, in Paris (later events question whether it was chance). After falling quickly in love, she agrees to marry him, following him to Afghanistan to aid Soviet rebels. During this time, she becomes comfortable in the town, making a number of Afghan friends. After a couple of months, she realizes she is pregnant, and then gives natural birth to a daughter that the couple names Chantal. Soon after the birth, Lambert makes the horrific discovery about Jean-Pierre’s affiliation with the Soviet Union’s KGB. His real agenda in their Afghan town is to acquire intel on the operations of the rebels, feeding it back to military officials so they can squelch any revolutionary fronts before they erupt. Within this agenda, his core directive is to find a way to assassinate the rebels’ leader, Masud.



Lambert agonizes over how to respond to the revelation about Jean-Pierre. She knows she has an obligation to stop him from killing the Afghans whom she now calls her friends, but she still loves him despite the treachery, and doesn’t want to disturb the life of her child. Making matters worse, Ellis appears in the town, on a mission to forge an alliance between Masud and a number of other rebel groups in Afghanistan. Ellis tries to collect the signatures of different rebel leaders to forge a formal pact of solidarity to increase the revolution’s cohesion and network. He is unaware of Jean-Pierre’s KGB affiliation, who tries to sabotage the alliance, but fails. After the failed sabotage, Jean-Pierre leaves Lambert and his child on a temporary but extended KGB mission. During this time, a jaded Lambert and lost Ellis reunite and express their love.

One day, the KGB launches a military assault on the town. Lambert and Ellis manage to detonate a bomb on the bridge that the military vehicles are passing over, thwarting them. Knowing they can no longer safely stay lest their identities be broadly known to Russia, they escape Afghanistan with Chantal via a maze of mountain passes known as the Butter Trail. KGB helicopters pass overhead, searching for them, and they learn that some of the Afghans they meet are working for the Soviets. Meanwhile, Jean-Pierre’s character evolves, becoming increasingly psychotic and malignant as it is illuminated that his fanaticism for destroying the rebels and US allies stems from the violent persecution of his Communist father. As they pass through small towns looking for resources, Follett draws a realistic account of rural mountainous Afghan life: insular but at the same time, vulnerable to instabilities in the region, and lacking solidarity and trust.

Eventually, the couple and the child make it out of Afghanistan and return home. Having now reconciled her previously strictly idealist vision of the future with the realities of the complex moral systems that all individuals harbor, Lambert settles with Ellis, recognizing his good nature. The end of the novel leaves the couple’s future ambiguous as the Cold War continues to unfold in neighboring lands, its reverberations heard everywhere in Europe.