J’s Take on Farthing by Jo Walton

I may have gotten around to reading this book eventually. I had seen Ha’Penny was on the list of novels being considered for the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards and borrowed it from the library, before realizing it was book two of a series. So I may or may not have been motivated to track down Farthing […]

I may have gotten around to reading this book eventually. I had seen Ha’Penny was on the list of novels being considered for the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards and borrowed it from the library, before realizing it was book two of a series. So I may or may not have been motivated to track down Farthing and read it, except that K had this idea of all of us reading and reviewing the same book, and M suggested this one.

Farthing is a British mystery set in the 1940’s, but it’s also an alternate history. Then there’s a dash of gay interest thrown in. Taken separately, I wouldn’t have been interested in this book, but all together, there’s enough there to make it worth a read.

How well does it work as a mystery? I don’t read a lot of mysteries, but it seemed to me to be rather dull and also rather obvious. We have two point of view characters, only one of which is the detective, so the other character has rather more access to information than the detectives usually get. Which means the reader knows more, and this reader is not an idiot.

In particular, there are a couple of chapters where the detective is just driving here and driving there and tracking down this bit of information that’s needed and the writing there is quite uninspired.

How does it work as an alternate history? Again, I don’t read a lot of alternate history — or real history for that matter — so I found it a little confusing. How much of the situation was true and accurate and how much was a what-if? The basic premise though, I believe, is that the UK signed a truce with Hitler to let him go on doing whatever he wanted elsewhere as long as he stayed out of Great Britain. Which, you may imagine, is not good news for the Jewish people in Europe. But on the face of it, it seems a good thing for the Brits. No more bombings, no more evacuations. The political climate is changing though. I don’t think you’ll be seeing socialized medicine in this UK.

How does it work as gay interest? Not interesting enough. One of the primary bi characters in the story is dead years before the story begins. The main character’s lover never makes it on screen. He barely even spares a thought for him. So the gay interest is all political. Which is fine and all, but it would’ve been nice to see some affection, no matter how non-public and discreet it would need to have been.

So all in all, rather disappointing on all fronts. The two positives I will say about it are, one, that it was very readable, even in the more uninteresting of the chapters. It didn’t feel like a slog. And, two, I found the two point of view characters interesting and likeable. I would read more with either of those characters, though I would be fervently hoping for some more interesting plots and scenes to come along.

If I were to give it stars out of five, I’d give it a very middle-of-the-road 3.

Farthing (Jo Walton)

The Plot
In 1941, before Pearl Harbor brought the United States into WWII, Britain made a treaty with Nazi Germany and abandoned Europe to the Third Reich. Eight years later, Hitler is still in power, most of Europe is under his control, and the Jewish people are being systematically exterminated. The British Empire remains […]

The Plot
In 1941, before Pearl Harbor brought the United States into WWII, Britain made a treaty with Nazi Germany and abandoned Europe to the Third Reich. Eight years later, Hitler is still in power, most of Europe is under his control, and the Jewish people are being systematically exterminated. The British Empire remains free, but hanging out with the wrong crowd for so long is beginning to tell. When Sir James Thirkie, the architect of the peace treaty, is found murdered in his bed during a country house weekend, Scotland Yard is dispatched to find out who did it.

My Thoughts
I’m not sure how realistic I find the scenario proposed in this book. The turning point in this alternate history is the peace treaty Britain signs with Germany in 1941, around the time the Blitz is ending. Why would Germany propose peace at that time? Why would Britain agree? I’m not sure. Germany clearly gets something out of the deal — they no longer have to fight a war on two fronts. But they started the war in the first place, so they surely thought they could win. There are hints also that Japan was not defeated either, and certainly things are going oddly in the United States, as Charles Lindbergh is president instead of becoming a pariah. I don’t feel like enough information was given to make a conclusion as to how logical this was or not. The history is just presented as is, without any real information given other than the existence of this peace accord.

In addition to these broad issues with the whole timeline, there are a few problems in the specifics of the characters. Bisexuality and homosexuality appear to be rampant among the cast of characters assembled. I’m all for presenting these things as common, but it starts to feel like a BL manga when the whole cast is sleeping with or has slept with someone of the same sex. There were about 10-12 characters who had more than a walk on appearance in the story, and of those, half were either currently or previously involved in a same-sex relationship.

The solution to the mystery was also presented in a confusing fashion. In the grand tradition of the golden age crime novel, the solution was presented at the end by the detective. He gives a grand monologue to his superior, going over all the things he’s managed to learn and how they relate to the crime. But the Inspector presented the case in a pretty wishy washy fashion, with very little actual evidence and lots of conjecture. He never managed to actually acquire several important facts which would have strengthened his conclusions. I don’t doubt that his lack of information, contrasted with the similar but different lack of information of Lucy Kahn, the book’s other protagonist, was part of the point, but it just made it seem like he wasn’t particularly competent.

I also have to say that I found it jarring to keep skipping back and forth between first person chapters from Lucy’s point of view to third person chapters from Carmichael’s point of view. It’s a very odd style choice.

The writing itself, I can find little to gripe about. It was plain and to the point, without a lot of frills and pointless description cluttering it up. If not for the depressing subject matter making it difficult to read for an extended period of time, the book would have been a reasonably quick read.

In Short
Overall, I think this book was trying to be too many things at once. It was a country house mystery, it was an alternate history, it was a political intrigue, it was a social commentary. Unfortunately, the author was not quite up to the task. What suffered the most was the central mystery plot, which was full of holes and unresolved threads. Many of the rules of the Detection Club were broken. There were a number of other far-fetched bits which also detracted from the whole, though given the idiotic behavior of politicians in the real world, that was more a case of fiction needing to be less insane than reality. It’s difficult to evaulate the book on its own, though, as in spite of the mystery seemingly wrapping up by the end, it’s really not a stand alone novel. If you like alternate histories, you may like this one; I wouldn’t recommend it for straight up mystery fans.

I also take exception to the classification of this book as science fiction. It is not science fiction; there is no science whatsoever involved in the plot. The correct classification would be speculative fiction, of which science fiction is a subgenre along with fantasy, alternative histories and a few other hybrids.