Farthing

[sawyl]

As mentioned previously, one of the fruits of my weekend sojourn to Bristol was Farthing by Jo Walton. The story is set in an alternate version of 1949, a world where America remained neutral and Britain negotiated a Peace with Honour deal with Hitler in 1941 to bring it out of the war. Here are a few quick thoughts.

Whilst attending a weekend party at Farthing House, the country seat of the Eversley family and spiritual home of the Farthing Set, Sir James Thirkie, architect of the peace and current education minister, is found murdered, a six pointed star pinned to his chest with a dagger. The police, lead by Inspect Peter Carmichael of Scotland Yard, start to investigate the other attendees of the party. Could the murderer by Lady Angela Thirkie, the dead man's wife? Or her sister, Daphne Normanby, who had been having an affair with Sir James? Or could it be a Bolshie anarchist, intent on destroying the country? Or perhaps the killer is David Kahn, the Jewish husband of Lucy Eversley, the daughter of the family?

Farthing is a clever, elegantly written novel with a seriously dark heart. What starts out as an Agatha Christie or Dorothy L Sayers murder at a great country house, is cleverly subverted by appalling suspects and their fascist sympathies. The simplicity of the story is further undermined by the narrative structure, which alternates between third person accounts of the police investigation and a first person account related by Lucy Kahn — something that really brings home nastiness of Farthing Set's anti-Semitism and suggests that things really aren't going to end well.