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

[gramarye1971]

I tend to avoid most World War II AUs like the plague because I struggle with suspending disbelief on the subject, let alone allowing an author to convince me that their world makes sense. So I too think that I wouldn't believe in the Farthing world, no matter how well written it is.

But now I'm thinking about Le Carré. I think that the nearest he comes to unredeemed/unredeeming characters is in The Looking Glass War. It's probably his bleakest Cold War novel because it captures a particularly plausible scenario -- where the main characters can't quite remember whether they're fighting the current enemy (the Russians) or the enemy from the previous war (the Germans), and don't have the resources or support from home to actually design a workable plan of action but go ahead anyway because they're desperate to feel that they're still relevant, and when Smiley shows up briefly he's only there long enough to deliver the sad verdict that no one is going to rescue the protagonist from his suicidal mission because no one in charge at home cares enough to expend the political capital needed to save him. I don't need to suspend my disbelief at all for that scenario, but I can see why The Looking Glass War wasn't one of Le Carré's more popular books.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Looking Glass War is very sad, isn't it? And horribly believable. But I can believe in Control and Smiley sacrificing one man ruthlessly, without believing them entirely unredeemable. (though I agree, Control is probably as close as it gets to unredeemable, partly because he has no personal life at all)