Farthing

In 1949 in an alternate England, Hitler is in control of all of western Europe. After the Battle of Britain, Churchill was overthrown and England made peace with Hitler, largely due to the efforts of the “Farthing Set.” Newlywed Lucy is the daughter of prominent members of the Farthing Set. She married her Jewish husband, David, against her parents' wishes. Although England isn't under Hitler's control, antisemitism is on the rise. Lucy and David are surprised to receive an invitation to her parents' weekend house party. Things turn ugly when one of the guests is discovered dead in his room on Sunday morning. When clues turn up pointing to David as the killer, Lucy is certain that he's being framed for murder. So is the Scotland show more Yard detective assigned to the case. With pressure mounting for David's arrest and quick closure of the investigation, to what length will Lucy go to protect her husband?

In Farthing, Jo Walton gives readers an alternate form of the Golden Age mystery – my favorite genre. I loved the points of similarity, but I found the differences unsettling. I find it satisfying to read about the righting of wrongs and the triumph of justice in Golden Age mysteries. It provides an escape from real life, when all too often crimes go unsolved or the guilty go free on technicalities. In this way the alternate history of Farthing is more like the real world than the world of the Golden Age mystery. show less

Alas, another case of the right reader, wrong book. I went into Farthing with rather high expectations, I confess. I saw Walton has won a couple of awards for other works--including the World Fantasy Award--and this one was nominated for a Nebula and Locus, among others. When this series got several mentions on The Incomparable (produced by 5by5), a podcast series devoted to all things geek sci-fi, I became tempted to try it. When the book arrived from the library, I was surprised to discover it was more alt-history than either fantasy or sci-fi. Well, I thought, I can manage. I rather love the gentle English mysteries, and I'm a huge fan of Connie Willis' [b:To Say Nothing of the Dog|77773|To Say Nothing of the Dog|Connie show more Willis|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1363105428s/77773.jpg|696]. Within pages, it referenced [b:Three Men in a Boat|4921|Three Men in a Boat|Jerome K. Jerome|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347518006s/4921.jpg|4476508], another English tale that Willis references. Okay. Might kind of familiar. Little did I realize I was not in for a charming body-in-the-library English romp but more an exploration of the Third Reich and England if history had gone another way.

It begins with the the gentle tones of a Dorothy Sayers mystery, narrated by a daffy Wooster-like aristocratic lead, Lucy. She's perplexedly trying to do up her hair at the same time she comforts her charming Jewish husband that the slight he just endured wasn't personally meant. Of course, she's soothing him; she understands it was meant, as Jewish people aren't considered equal with the upper-crust crowd. The book begins to take on more ominous tones; not only are we dealing with the general foibles of the gentry (dressing for dinner? Fixing hair over feelings?), but underlying class and racial divides as well. Hmm. Still as some potential to explore the situation, only in a multi-culti kind of way. Okay, that's cool.

Then the body is found; not only is a guest at the house party murdered, but his body is desecrated with a Jewish star, used on the Continent to identify Jews. The guests are suspicious of David, especially as the man killed is the one who brokered the peace between the governments of Britain and the Third Reich. But suspecting David seems obvious, and several herrings are deployed our way by his ridiculous widow and her sister--coincidentally, the victim's lover. Our heroine narrates these details in her charmingly silly way, protective of her husband, disgusted at the widow, but being careful that her thought "train didn't leave the station before I have a chance to stop it."

The viewpoint begins to alternate with that of a gay Scotland Yard Inspector. It starts to become clear that being gay is not acceptable, much like being Jewish, so the Inspector is largely closeted. Homosexuality and bisexuality becomes a mirror for the Jewish issue; a disenfranchised identity that is shared by many, however hypocritically. (There's a strange sub-bit here where Lucy shows her charming daffiness by sharing the terms she and her brother used for gay/bi/straight, including 'Athenean'). His own experiences lend him certain sympathies with David. I had hopes that the murderer would be successfully uncovered, as the Inspector showed definite signs of brains. His efforts to solve the case are troubled by the obligatory second-strike, only this time it was Bolsheviks. Inspector Carmichael struggles to reconcile these incongruous leads, but catches a break or two though determined detective work.

Suddenly, the storyline goes someplace darker, dropping the countryside romp for an exploration on politics, society and ethics. The last half of the book weren't about the murder as much as they were about politics. Lucy is no longer charming and daffy; she's impotent and waking to ugly realities. David is as well, as his natural tendency towards showing a positive example fails him. While I felt Walton avoided overt diatribes, politics around Hitler and Stalin are rarely subtle, and were used in overbearing fashion here. Frankly, I felt it also lacked creativity. Germany did a fine stand-in as the ultimate villain, but by the end, Britain wasn't far behind. The issues of sexuality seem a forced metaphor for the ways in which the ruling class spouts a party line but doesn't follow it. However, it seemed generally a crutch to explain relationships, intention and morality.

Overall, it left a bitter taste in my mouth for so many reasons--the disappointing story, anything involving the Third Reich, a tacked-on ending, and an interesting plot gone so wrong. It just isn't a congruous narrative; it wants to be both meat and meringue, and so succeeds at neither.

Cross posted at http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/farthing-by-jo-walton-try-quarter-fart...


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less

Farthing takes place in an alternate history, one where Britain made peace with Nazi Germany in 1941 leaving the USSR to fight alone. This is an England where Churchill never came to power and the social revolution of the postwar period never happened. An intriguing scenario which grabbed me straight away. But instead of a ‘what if?’ political thriller, the opening chapter read like a trad cosy crime country house whodunnit.
And that’s the extreme cleverness of Farthing. On one level it is an accomplished English murder-mystery, where all the drama comes from below stairs gossip. Then there’s a much more insidious side to it all, a creeping sinister realisation that the ditzy debutante and the honest cop who narrate alternate show more chapters of the story are gradually uncovering a very different postwar Britain to the one in our history books.

In this opening episode in the Small Change trilogy, the fictitious equivalents of the Bloomsbury set have negotiated a peace which allowed Hitler to concentrate his war efforts to the east. Soviet Russia is still fighting the sieges and famous battles, but instead of sympathy the communists evoke suspicion in the British people… as do the steady flow of Jewish refugees, fleeing the camps on the Continent. The UK government is gradually veering towards the right, in scary, subtle ways
In the midst of all this, a prominent member of the government has been murdered and a well-to-do Jew, husband of the flighty narrator, becomes a prime suspect. The policeman – a complex character who grew on me as the plot progressed – can see that all is not as it seems… but will he be able to conduct an honest investigation? And if he does, then what will it reveal?
(I go into more detail about the plot and characters at:
http://murdermayhemandmore.wordpress.com/2014/06/13/farthing-sly-subtle-and-soph... )

It’s smart, subtle writing and the comparisons with early Le Carre are more than fair. Walton uses an intimate investigation and two very personal viewpoints to examine the collapse of the British character. It’s all rather refreshing; occasionally wickedly witty, which only serves to underline the reader’s guilty realisation of enjoying the tale while the country is surreptitiously being fed to the political dogs…

Farthing touches on the very issue which allows radicalism to take ahold of any nation state: when and how do ordinary people abandon the principles of liberty and become the baying mob? It’s chilling, thought-provoking stuff, and at the same time extremely entertaining – not relentlessly grim or oppressive, unlike most novels which explore this subject. However, things are likely to take a gloomy turn in Book Two, I suspect.
9/10 show less

It was Hitler in Poland with the blitzkrieg what done it. Meanwhile, in an English country house, a genteel gathering is disturbed by a genteel, if suspiciously complicated, murder. It turns out that nice Mr Hitler has the right idea about them Jews and bolsheviks, so let's slide into fascism, yay! I may be suffering from mental exhaustion, but at least I'm not in a universe where Hitler won and a single murder is set to bring England in line! Can the doughty Scotland Yard Inspector solve the murder? Can the sensible aristocratic daughter who peeved her mother and society no end by marrying a Jew save her husband and herself? Is the future as bleak as a blasted heath? Five yellow stars pinned to a dead anti-semite and covered in fake show more blood for this! show less

Deftly blended, this combination of an alternate world history with an English country house mystery opens in 1949, but it’s not exactly the 1949 or England we know. Eight years earlier a group of conservative, anti-semitic politicians known as the “Farthing set” made peace with Nazi Germany, securing Britain’s borders after most of continental Europe had fallen to Hitler. The Germans continue to fight the Soviets, the American president is isolationist Charles Lindbergh, and the Jews left in Europe are living a nightmare.

Against this background, the aristocratic, politically powerful Farthing set comes together for a country weekend. The daughter of one of the couples, Lucy Kahn, is deeply in love and happily married to David, show more a Jewish man, so she’s surprised that her parents have invited them to join this gathering at her old family home. If it was up to her they’d skip it, she doesn’t like this group and they see her as a race traitor, but David thinks the invitation is a gesture of reconciliation so they go. But when they wake up the first morning they discover that a powerful politician has been murdered in his bed, and it quickly becomes clear that whoever did this is trying to frame David.

The story alternates between two very different voices. Lucy’s chapters chat to readers in the first person, while the point of view of Inspector Carmichael, sent by Scotland Yard to investigate the crime, is told through the third person. Carmichael is a principled, thoughtful man who has secrets of his own--he’s a homosexual. Though he’s working diligently to uncover the truth, he’s being pressured by his superiors to just arrest David and close the case.

Jo Walton’s versatility amazes me. The first books I read by her involved a simulation of Plato’s Republic, set up by the goddess Athena on the ancient island of Atlantis, but this is obviously a very different book, and she’s written it from two highly contrasting points of view. Tightly plotted, the tension builds quickly and continuously in Farthing, so by the time I was 80% in my heart was pounding and the book was impossible for me to put down. It’s the first book in a trilogy that I look forward to continuing once my adrenaline comes back down to normal levels. show less

Farthing starts off as a standard country-house mystery, with the historical twist that it's set in a Britain which has made peace with Hitler's Germany. "Farthing" is the name of the house itself, and of the political faction focused around the family. Alternate chapters focus on Lucy, the daughter of the house, and Inspector Carmichael, sent down from Scotland Yard to investigate a murder which took place during a house-party weekend. The focus, initially, is on the complicated relationships between the guests - told in Lucy's gossipy tone but of course, a mystery to the Inspector. But gradually it all becomes a little more complicated, and sinister.

I really enjoyed this. The world is well-drawn, and Lucy in particular is brilliant - show more the reader soon comes to realise that although she talks like an empty-headed daughter of the upper classes, she's far from that. The story is fast-moving and gripping, and kept me turning the pages late into the night. I'm not sure that I buy the blurb that it's a chilling portrait of how easily a world can slip into fascism - but it's still a very enjoyable thriller with its heart in the right place. show less

Summary: Lucy Kahn and her husband David were surprised to be invited to her parents' country estate for a summer retreat in 1949: Her parents are party of the elite "Farthing set," a party of upper-class British politicians, and they've never approved of her marriage to David, who is a Jew. They do their best to blend in, Lucy slipping more or less easily back into the wealth and priviledge with which she grew up... until on the first night of the party, one of the Farthing Set's most prominent men is murdered. It immediately becomes clear that David intended to be framed for the murder, as the scene involved several elements that indicated that a Jewish conspiracy was involved. Now it's up to Lucy, and to Inspector Carmichael from show more Scotland Yard, to prove that David is innocent, or else the political and social consequences could be devastating... because while the 1949 England of Farthing is largely the same as the 1949 England we're familiar with, the small change is that the Allies did not in fact win World War II, and the members of the Farthing Set were responsible for brokering peace with Herr Hitler.

Review: This book made me intensely uncomfortable, but uncomfortable in the best way possible. Everything about this book is sharp - the writing, the mystery, the pacing, and most of all the social commentary. So sharp that it manages to cut to the bone before you're even aware of what's happened. It starts out like a more-or-less standard murder mystery, where you're thinking "okay, Lucy's parents are a little bit racist, but that probably wasn't unusual for upper-class Brits at the time," and then gradually you start to accumulate hints that something's gone wrong, something's not quite right about this world and about these people, as Walton keeps filling in little details about how the world got to be the way it is. This subtle wrongness is accentuated with a horrifying (but equally slowly building) sense of just how close this world is to our world. How easy it is to slide from "normal" prejudice into outright fascism, and how few people would actually stand to oppose it, if they recognized what was happening at all. It's incisive social commentary, masterfully handled so that it's never spelled out (and thus never runs the risk of getting preachy), and trusts the reader enough to understand the point and draw the parallels on their own.

I do wonder how this book would have read when it first came out a decade ago. Reading it last summer, it was, as I said, equal parts horrifying and cutting and fascinating, and certainly relevant. But as much as I enjoyed it (maybe not the right word, it's too uncomfortable-making to really be "enjoyed"), after the U.S. Presidential election in November, I couldn't bring myself to listen to the next books in the series... it seems like we are now even closer to the world of Farthing, and it had gone from uncomfortable to anxiety-inducing just how thin the veil that separates us from them had now become. I'm working myself back up to it, though, because this really was an excellent book, in spite of (or in addition to?) how sharply it cuts. The characters are interesting and compelling and sympathetic (Lucy, David, and the inspector, at any rate), the mystery is well constructed, and it's easy to read and incredibly easy to get absorbed in; I tore through the audiobook in only a few days, needing to find out what happened next. I did have a bit of a problem keeping some of the names of some of the secondary character straight (one that probably would have been alleviated if I'd read the paper version rather than the audiobook, so it would be easier to flip back and check.) I also think there's probably some subtleties regarding British politics and their parliamentary system that went over my head, that might have made things even more complex. But even so, this book was an incredible read, and one that sticks with you, haunts you, long after you've read it. And even when you might want to just dismiss it as just speculative fiction, alternative history, fantasy, there's always that lingering doubt that it's not... not quite. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: It's not a light read, especially not in the current political climate, but it is an excellent and compelling one. If you don't need your reading to be too escapist, I highly recommend it. show less