{"id":649,"date":"2009-01-22T16:48:56","date_gmt":"2009-01-22T16:48:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=649"},"modified":"2024-01-24T08:39:44","modified_gmt":"2024-01-24T13:39:44","slug":"walton_202-203","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2009\/01\/walton_202-203\/","title":{"rendered":"Walton, Jo: (202-203) Ha’Penny; Half a Crown<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ha’Penny<\/cite> and Half a Crown<\/cite><\/strong> are the concluding books in Jo Walton’s Small Change (or Still Life with Fascists) series, which began with Farthing<\/cite><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Farthing<\/cite> was not written with sequels in mind, but I can’t remember if Ha’Penny<\/cite> was planned as a single sequel or the middle book in a trilogy. Regardless, reading it now after the publication of the complete trilogy, I couldn’t help but find it an example of middle-book syndrome; that is, I expected ultimate resolutions to wait until the last book. For me, this was exacerbated by its being set only a couple of weeks after Farthing<\/cite>. Inspector Carmichael, who investigated the country house mystery of Farthing<\/cite>, is now confronted with the explosion of a bomb at the home of a London actress. In the other narrative thread, Viola Lark finds herself trapped in a plot to kill Hitler and the British Prime Minister.<\/p>\n

Though I had the aforementioned middle-book problem in reading this, I recognize that it contains as much of an arc as possible. I was also impressed by the way my sympathies repeatedly shifted as things kept getting more complicated. And on an aesthetic level, I appreciated the unreliability of Viola’s narration; it can’t be easy to do first-person narration of someone who thinks she’s much saner than she actually is.<\/p>\n

Half a Crown<\/cite> is set in 1960 and again juxtaposes Carmichael’s third-person narration with the retrospective first-person narration of a woman, this time his teenaged ward Elvira. She is by far the least aware of the series’ narrators at the start, and part of the book is how she progresses from thinking that a fascist rally—complete with tied-together Jews to throw things at—is “jolly fun.”<\/p>\n

Elvira is just one example of what seems to me is the central concern of the book, people’s individual breaking points: what they will or will not betray and how far they can be pushed or will go themselves. And because politics is composed of people, this drives the plot through to the series’ end.<\/p>\n

As the concluding volume in a trilogy, it’s hard for my opinion of Half a Crown<\/cite> not to depend heavily on my opinion of that conclusion. And I have very mixed feelings about the ending, which strikes me as a peculiar mix of deep cynicism and optimistic deus ex machina. Which in one sense is not entirely fair, as the d.e.m. bits have, in retrospect, been set up as much as possible given the limitations of narrative structure; and yet I can’t seem to shake the feeling of abruptness that I got on the first reading.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately I can’t be more specific without spoiling the whole thing, which I’m not willing to do. It’s one of my personal truisms of narrative art that questions are easy and answers are hard; that is, a work that sets up fascinating mysteries or difficult problems is almost certainly going to do better at that part than at revealing the answer or fixing the problem. (Dan Simmons, I’m looking at you.) In other words, Farthing<\/cite> may remain the book in the trilogy that people like best, or at least find most satisfying. But if you appreciated Farthing<\/cite>, I think it’s worth reading the rest of the series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ha’Penny and Half a Crown are the concluding books in Jo Walton’s Small Change (or Still Life with Fascists) series, which began with Farthing. Farthing was not written with sequels in mind, but I can’t remember if Ha’Penny was planned as a single sequel or the middle book in a trilogy. Regardless, reading it now … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Walton, Jo: (202-203) Ha’Penny; Half a Crown<\/cite>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,15,17],"tags":[426],"class_list":["post-649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","category-small-change","tag-walton-jo"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2573,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions\/2573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}