Farthing by Jo Walton: a ramble

[bunn]

This book came with a recommendation by Ursula Le Guin on the cover  "If Le Carré scares you, read Jo Walton"  it said.    So, here is a quote from one of my very favouritist authors, referencing one of my other very favouritist authors?  Ooo!

It starts out as very much a Dorothy Sayers type country house mystery, full of charm and interesting layers and dubious characters.  Awesome, another favorite author, and done pretty well!   And echoes of JIM Stewart too.    And then it twisted and turned and ended up in alternative-history seriously scary Britain Slides into Naziism territory.   Definitely well written and very compelling.

But.  When it came right down to it, I didn't believe it.    I didn't believe in Churchill silenced and overruled in 1941, I didn't believe in taking Rudolph Hess seriously, I don't believe in a British working class that lies down like that to be exploited,  I don't believe in a British educated class that can still remember the First World War that would try it.  I don't believe the British aristocracy was ever that unified, that evil, that separate, or that broken.  Why would they be?  They lost a generation of their young men too.

There's still a huge difference between regretting a won war from safe land never touched by an invader, and regretting a horribly unsuccessful one among the ruins of your homeland.

Maybe I'm lying to myself.  Maybe I'm too optimistic about human nature, and it really was that close.  But I still don't believe it.

I don't think Le Carré, even at his angriest (and that is pretty damn angry), is quite as black as the end of Farthing.  I don't think any of his villains (or heroes) are quite that unredeemed and uncomplicated.

One thing I love about Le Carré is that terrible moment when it turns out that Karla the Soviet idealogue loves his daughter and will give up his ideological position to save her, and that Smiley, the self-defined decent man full of doubt realises how far he's fallen by taking ruthless advantage of that.    The real villains in Farthing would never do that.

Le Carré writes from a position in the middle of things, somehow.  His position is quintessentially European and... I originally wrote British, but I think actually, in this case, I really do mean English. Like Tolkien, he seems somehow  grounded in the twentieth century with all its nightmares.  His darkness isn't as dark, but for me, it's realer, I think.

Comments

Here from LJ promoted posts

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

One of the things I find interesting about the trilogy is the way Walton has said it expressly derives from reading Josephine Tey, in which the Second World War appears to have happened (the odd character's relative or dentist has died in a bomb blast) but it has had absolutely none of the effects the real WWII had - no rationing, no landscapes shaped by bombing, even in industrial towns, no military experience on the part of any of Tey's male characters even one clearly of an age to have served. So that's why she postulated the Halifax carve up in 1940/1. But it's terribly inconsistent world-building, which is interesting given it was inspired by terribly inconsistent worldbuilding.

Re: Here from LJ promoted posts

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Oh, really? I think I've only read The Daughter of Time, and didn't know that the series was inspired by Tey; it's nice to have a reasoning for the decision to go for 1941/2 as the division point.

I guess that a twentieth century AU is always going to be fraught because there's so much known, and it's relatively close and personal still.

Re: Here from LJ promoted posts

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

It's not helped by Walton making some inexcusable errors of detail; the most egregious of this is all the robin symbolism, which is all tied into the farthing coin and which is used on the corpse. Except that the actual farthing never bore a robin on it; it bore a wren, which was because the wren is one of the smallest British birds and the farthing was the smallest coin.

Re: Here from LJ promoted posts

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I assumed that was just an AU being AU. I don't mind that really, perhaps it can be a token that the worlds diverged before 1941?

But for the worlds to have diverged so dramatically to have that kind of major social and political difference, that seems like it should have much more explanation than just a small signifier that things are very very different. The Farthing universe seems like it needs to have started much earlier to make sense.

Re: Here from LJ promoted posts

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately there are a lot of others which made me go "Nope. This isn't AU, this is just wrong" (baronets sitting in the House of Lords, forex, which would have meant that the point of fission would have had to have been at least James I era, since he created baronets as a cheap way of creating saleable hereditary knighthoods) or Southend having a view over the Channel (so add in a major landslip while you're at it. "Major" as in "has taken out Kent.")

Suspension of disbelief is hard enough in a historical AU as it without making it hard to distinguish worldbuilding from sloppiness.

Re: Here from LJ promoted posts

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I had missed Southend, good spot.