Book Review: Farthing, Jo Walton

Farthing posits an alternate history in which Britain negotiates a "Peace with Honour" with Hitler in 1941. By 1949 when the novel takes place, Hitler had overrun Europe, Nazi death camps still operate, the US (where Lindbergh is president) had closed its borders, and antisemitism runs rampant in Britain. The story is told from the point of view of Lucy Kahn, the daughter of a powerful aristocratic family with whom she has fallen out of favor because of her recent marriage to a Jewish banker, and from the point of view of a Scotland Yard detective who is called to Lucy's family's estate to investigate the murder of a political heavy-weight who was staying there for the weekend. The novel works much like a cozy murder mystery, with investigations into the murder forming the backbone of the story. And that format makes this history even more sinister than it already seems at first glance. Because so much of the story reads like a gentle murder story in which nothing too terribly awful will happen, the little details of the way the world works in the alternate history are all the more sharp and shocking and terrifying.

While I enjoyed Farthing a lot (it's written just wonderfully, and Walton handles her characters, setting, and plot deftly), the book did feel a bit uneven. It eventually becomes clear that things are even a lot worse than they appear in this version of Britain, and the book goes from interestingly sinister to downright chilling in the last few chapters. That move was appropriate, and, indeed, it felt the like the book was building toward it all along. But the transition still seemed a little rushed, and the novel ultimately felt not wholly in balance because of it. I'm also still puzzling over Walton's choice to make so many of her characters here secretly gay. Of the major players (easily a dozen), at least five turn out to be Also Gay, by which I mean they are introduced as having a certain bearing on the story (such as being a major figure in the politics of Britain) and then a while later we find out that they are also gay (or bi) (with the fact of their sexuality rarely having anything to do with the plot). I am always happy to see people who historically have often been elided from fiction better represented on the page, but the way Walton kept sliding this fact in about many of her characters led me to suspect that the fact of their sexuality was going be become very important either thematically or in the plot. And it never did.  Curious. Perhaps it will become clear in the second book in the series, which I am excited to read.


This review originally appeared on my LibraryThing account.

On Heirs and History

I am not yet tired of hearing about the pregnancy of the Duchess of Cambridge, but I am tired of hearing people moan about how they don't want to hear about it.  It's been only two days, and I am already blisteringly weary of dismissals of the news: "Who cares?" and "Just another celebrity pregnancy media frenzy."  Sorry.  Tisn't.   

I will grant that many are far too wrapped up in the lives of celebrities, and the hysteria some Brits  show over the Royals can sometimes seem over-the-top and bewildering.  I hope (probably in vain) that the Duke and Duchess can live out her pregnancy in some kind of normalcy (and in health--that  the Duchess has been hospitalized for hyperemesis gravidarum is a cause for some concern), but there is no escaping the fact that she, her unborn child, and her husband are walking history.  That is a future monarch she is carrying there, and questions of the wisdom and feasibility of the continuation of a monarchy in Great Britain aside (that's a topic for another time), the pending birth of a future monarch is a big deal.  

Not as big a deal as it would have been four, or even one, hundred years ago, but a big deal still.  Whatever one's opinion about the royal family, there is no denying that who they are and what they do is considered to be top news by millions: it is estimated that some 300 million people watched Prince William and Catherine Middleton's wedding in April 2011, 1.2 million people lined the royal pageant route on Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee and 14.7 million watched the Diamond Jubilee Concert in June 2012, and 10 million people a year in Britain alone have tuned into the Queen's annual Christmas Speech in recent years).*  The members of the House of Windsor fascinate their subjects (even while they and the royal system which they embody may infuriate some of their subjects as well), and, if interviews with some of those who come out to line The Mall during celebrations such as Royal Weddings and Jubilees are any indication, their service to the Commonwealth engenders loyalty, admiration, and gratitude in many.  That being the case, the birth of a child who will change the line of succession and thus change the future face of the British monarchy is certainly newsworthy.    

But what is infinitely more compelling to me, what has me excited to hear about this pregnancy, is the sense of history that comes with this news.  So much of Britain's history rests on who sat on the throne and who could or could not produce a legitimate successor, and while the political ramifications of not producing an heir are less dire now than they have been in Britain's past, the event of Prince William's marriage and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge's, subsequent pregnancy connects us to that past.  I have always thought that the British seem to be more aware of their history during their day-to day lives than we are--a result, perhaps, of having a national figure who is a living, breathing link to hundreds of years of royal and political history.  The royal family we see today--Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, Prince William, and, of course, all the rest of the Queen's children and grandchildren--are a result and a reminder of hundreds of years of history.  The current Queen's father gave a rousing speech at the start of WWII that helped unite a country under threat; her uncle was at the heart of a scandal that tested the relationship between the monarch and parliament; her grandfather ruled during WWI, her great-grandfather had a period named after him (Edwardian), her great-great grandmother, too (you might have heard of it).  When we watch The King's Speech and get swept up in the story of that man's life and the history he lived, is it not marvelous to realize that the dignified woman we see celebrating sixty years on the throne is his daughter?  Or to think, when we see that episode of Doctor Who with Queen Victoria that plays on the history of her family, that that story (in more realistic terms, perhaps) is still being told?      

Millions of people the world over can do this, too, can trace their ancestry back hundreds of years, can point to the historical events their families influenced or were a part of.  And history, after all, is made up not just of the names and deeds everyone knows but of the names and deeds no one knows.  But the children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be the next step in a part of history that we can see, and that is just mind-bendingly brilliant.  To think that these children will be the direct descendents of people who stare at us out of black and white plates in our history books; to realize that the past isn't dead, that, in fact, it walks about, living, breathing, falling in love, having children; to be reminded of this is simply grand.  

And we Americans, who are so unfailingly interested in trying to pull the beliefs and attitudes of our founding fathers into the present, who are fascinated by the complex histories of our own important ruling familes (the Adamses, the Kennedys, the Bushes), and who have a history of the family Bible with its carefully filled out family tree at the center, should have no trouble at all understanding why the impending birth of the great-great-great-great-great grandchild of a figure of such national and international historical import would be breaking news.  




*The population of Britain in 2010 was ~62 million, meaning about 16% of the population watched the Queen's Christmas Speech.  By contrast, about 37.8 million people watched President Obama's 2011 State of the Union Speech, or about 12% of the US population. These comparisons are not strictly one-to-one (I don't mean to equate the President of the USA's State of the Union Address and the Queen's Christmas Speech; they do not serve the same function), but the point that people care about the royals is adequately made, I think.    

**Also, a nod to Jane Murray's The Kings and Queens of England, which is always my go-to for sorting who-came-after-who and who-was-who's-father.