Reviews for Farthing

The average rating for Farthing based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-12-03 00:00:00 Terry C Wilson My initial thoughts on reading Farthing by Jo Walton was: why do an alternate history? It's been done before, and in a lot of ways, what can this quiet, minimalist Welsh author do for this side street sub-genre of the speculative fiction highway? Phillip K. Dick wrote The Man in the High Castle, published in 1962, where the Axis had won, but here, there has been a stalemate between England and Nazi Germany. Hitler has turned east, and after a peace accord has been signed, he turns on the Russian Bolsheviks and has left Great Britain, and a President Charles Lindbergh led, increasingly isolationist US and Imperialist Japan is in Shanghai. What is science fiction or fantasy? PKD said of the difference "Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances" and so in that regard, and under Dick's definition, Farthing is most definitely science fiction since military and political historians have opined that Hitler making this decision, to fight on only one front, was very much possible… an alternate history. Anti-Semitism. There are no Jews allowed in the US and the people in England have anti Jewish sentiment, just as "on the Continent". At it's heart, Farthing is a murder mystery about an odd assassination in an English country estate, a member of the ruling party, the same group that had orchestrated the pact with Hitler and a Jewish man is being implicated in a ridiculously thin charade. Reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here. Walton has shown that it can happen in Great Britain as Jewish citizens enjoy a perilous position, better than those in Europe, but not wholly free either. Homosexuality. Interestingly, this is a central theme of the novel. It seems that most characters have some homosexual tendencies. Walton's characters make a fun terminological distinction between Roman - straight; Macedonian - both, and Athenian - homosexual (reminiscent of The Kinsey scale, also called the Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale) and laws making illegal homosexual acts as a way to control people. Courage. Farthing is a statement on the English character, "keeping a stiff upper lip and all that" and "keeping the sides up" both as a compliment and an indictment. Walton spends time and makes observation and comment upon royalty and class distinctions. The author also demonstrates how the rule of law and the importance of having one system that is the same for rich and poor is imperative in one of her more cautionary aspects of this story. This also reminds me of the scientific experiment where the test subject thinks he is conducting a question and answer session and an actor plays the part of the testee. When the testee answers incorrectly, the testor is told to press a button that he is told will deliver an electric shock to the actor playing the testee. Even when the test subject is told that the electric shock is approaching lethal levels and when the actor is pretending to writhe in pain, the experiment still revealed that a high percentage of people continued to shock the other person. The reason being simply that they were told to do this. Walton makes the realistic observation that bad things can happen in good places, that even good people, courageous people in ordinary situations can fall short when in extraordinary hardship. Finally, Walton owes a literary debt to George Orwell. Subtle, understated allusions to 1984 are prevalent and are shown contextually correct to her story.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-15 00:00:00 Mark Ork 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' To Say Nothing of the Dog. Within pages, it referenced Three Men in a Boat, 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 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.