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Okay, so I just finished Jo Walton's /Farthing/. If you don't like spoilers, read no further.

Someone is going to have to teach me how to use livejournal cut tags, because I haven't really cared about such things yet.

It's a ghastly ominous ending, and I love it and hug it to my heart. I was warned before I got to that point in the reading that Abby was a Quaker, and I'm glad I was warned, because otherwise sentimentality would have overflowed within me. All I can say is that this is a splendid novel, written for our times, and I am pleased to know that sequels await my attention.

May the Farthingparty have much fun!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

arkuat

kalmn, my dear, it wasn't about flinging shit on americans, it was about david's faith in england. if we can't measure up, that's not the author's problem, it's yours and mine.

From:

pameladean

http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=75

You can also find out how to italicize book titles. It's really easy, but I was forever either closing them twice or opening them and not closing them.

You can download a client (I have no idea why they call it that) that will allow you to make your post offline with nifty little buttons for lj-cuts, italics, and the silly LJ bobbly thing that turns an LJ name into a link to the person's journal. I use Semagic. That said, a lot of the time I can't be bothered to fire up Semagic when I'm already right in LJ with a "Post to Journal" button staring at me.

I'm glad that being spoiled about the role of the Quaker lady was a goodness.

I haven't any nuanced views of Farthing yet, having read it so recently, but I think it might be going into my "perfect books" list. This is highly idiosyncratic; it means "perfect for me, on its own terms as I see them." It has so much humor and balance and contrast, and it has such a light touch on such very heavy matters, but it doesn't flinch aside from them, either. I admire that greatly.

P.

From:

arkuat

OK, I'm going to try to post some balanced and considered literary criticism here to counter my initial emotional response. Thanks to

kalmn and

pameladean for teaching me how to use cut tags.

Why does this book look as if it had been easy to write? Because the author took the well-developed conventions of the English country house mystery and the well-developed conventions of sf of the alternate-history variety and mashed them together neatly. In my opinions, one of the things that is great about Farthing is that the author took the ease thereby dispensed and used it to concentrate on more difficult and more worthy things. Astute use of established artistic conventions in order to surpass the works that used them before is something that I always admire.

Jo Walton has a fascinating economy of language with which she develops her two viewpoint characters, Carmichael and Lucy. (Her alternating use of first-person and third-person to make it clear which character has the principal viewpoint right now is something that I admire and will comment no further on right here.) She establishes a sympathy between them by developing, in so few and undistracting words, Lucy's knowledge about Macedonians and Athenians and Romans on the one hand, and Carmichael's occasional self-comforting thoughts of his batman Jack who has a few days off on his own back in Carmichael's bed. And then she uses this understanding and sympathy to killing effect when Normanby, while being interviewed by Carmichael, pretends to prefer weak tea with lemon in it. "Pretend" being the key word here, since Carmichael is a professional detective (working for Scotland Yard, too, rather than outside of it). She does a hell of a lot more with these themes than I am hinting at here, but anyone who has read the novel well knows what I'm talking about.

I want to move on and talk about "The law, in its supreme majesty, forbids equally for both the rich and the poor alike to steal bread and to sleep under bridges", which I'm doubtless misquoting. The epigram in question is doodled on a notepad by a hardworking Carmichael at one point. At some later point, he writes a name underneath it in order to show a name that he realizes he is probably mispronouncing to a suspect he is interviewing. He thinks better of it, and writes the name on a fresh sheet to show. (This draws attention back to the original quotation, and that's wonderfully effective, without actually spelling it out again.) Later still, he crumples up the original sheet with the doodle on it and almost dispenses of it a wastebasket in an office belonging to Lord Eversley, Lucy's dad. But being the consummate professional that he is, he thinks better of it, digs it out of the wastebasket, and tucks it securely into his own back pocket, where Batman Jack can wonder about it after the novel has concluded.

The quotation that I've misquoted is central to themes that weave through this novel, and I salute the author's economy of words in drawing attention to it without distracting from the onflowing river of the story she is telling.

Finally, I wish I had servants like the Eversleys did at Farthing, so they could so readily betray the machinations of any villain that ever fooled me and made eir way into my home and my company. But that would be classist of me, wouldn't it now? And if I lived in such a classist society, then Scotland Yard (well, the FBI and the local police, in my case) would just ignore what the servants had found out about the unscrupulous people I had made the mistake of becoming chummy with, now wouldn't they? I guess that classism and the reality of the society it engendered is one of the things that made the English country-house mystery so great in the first place. This novel is a historical novel as well, because I hear tell you can't hire help like that anymore nowadays.