New York: Tor, 2006; £25.95 hb; 320pp

reviewed in New York Review of Science Fiction 223, March 2007

If one were to characterise this excellent novel briefly it might be possible to describe it as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day rewritten by Agatha Christie. No, let’s choose someone with a little more awareness of the nuance of character, the fluidity of plot, Dorothy Sayers, perhaps, or Margery Allingham. Except that there is an imp of the perverse in Walton and in her characters that rescues it from the formal straightjacket this might imply.

It is, as in Ishiguro’s novel, a delicate country house story that deftly reveals the fascism underlying the British establishment. It is also a traditional crime story in which someone without an enemy is murdered in peculiar circumstances, and an idiosyncratic investigator must choose between a small and unlikely circle of suspects. The two halves of the story are put into the hands of two central characters. We see the house and its rather stifling society through the eyes of Lucy, the daughter of Lord and Lady Eversley, the owners of Farthing which nestles in the Hampshire countryside. As the novel opens, Lucy appears silly and girlish, happy to accept the privileges that are unquestioned in such august surroundings. But she is never an uncritical observer of the scene. Her brother was killed during the war (the novel is set in the summer of 1949), and now she has married her brother’s wartime comrade, David. Yet this is a particularly wilful act, because David Kahn is a Jew, unwelcome in the upper echelons of the English establishment, and Lucy has been disinherited and must put up with daily slights and insults, particularly from her monstrous mother. Nevertheless, the pair have been unexpectedly invited down to Farthing for a hastily arranged weekend party, and Lucy alternates between feeling comfortably at home and wary amid the minefield of aristocrats, MPs and their wives.

Then Lord Thirkie is found murdered, a dagger pinning a Star of David to his chest.

Suddenly we are witnessing something far nastier than the casual anti-Semitism familiar among the English upper classes. In the middle of the war, when Rudolf Hess flew to Britain on his quixotic mission, it was Thirkie who returned with him to Germany and negotiated an honourable peace with Hitler. Now Germany is bogged down in an inconclusive war with Russia, the rest of Europe is under Nazi rule, and the pro-German ‘Farthing set’ is on the verge of seizing power in Britain. (It is worth noting that Walton nods to the two most intriguing and significant alternate histories of recent years: Hess’s flight as the turning point echoes Christopher Priest’s The Separation, while she has proto-fascist Charles Lindbergh in the White House as in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.) In fact the house party in which Lucy and David are such uncomfortable participants marks the final preparations for the coup that will see the Farthing set take over the top jobs in the Conservative government.

As Lucy’s first-person narrative reveals her growing understanding of the way her mother sits at the heart of this dark web, so alternate chapters tell, in the third person, of the police investigations carried out by Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard. Just as Lucy’s marriage has given her the unfamiliar perspective of an outsider, so Carmichael is another outsider: a northerner uneasy in the south, a man of unexpectedly refined tastes (he shares, with Lucy and David, a preference for delicate China tea, which puts the three of them at odds with everyone else in the book), and above all a homosexual in a determinedly homophobic society. But it is precisely his outsider status which allows him to glimpse the intricate network of homosexual and adulterous relationships which tie together the various members of the Farthing set. It is this, moreover, which allows him to see through the crude attempt to pin the murder on David.

When a young man carrying a communist party membership card shoots at Lucy and her father as they are out riding, and is immediately killed by Lord Eversley, it seems to add an extra and inexplicable complication to Carmichael’s investigation. But in fact this is the key that will eventually unlock the mystery for Carmichael – and at the same time close up the investigation. To this point, Farthing has been a pleasing alternate history with a lightly sketched premise and an intriguing crime story twist. But now it darkens steadily. Because the story shifts between Lucy and Carmichael, we are privy to information and connections that the two viewpoint characters cannot be aware of, so it comes as no surprise to learn who committed the crime, but that is not the point. The point is the use made of the crime. Feeding on the publicity, the Farthing set has successfully swept into power and initiated a set of repressive laws that will turn Britain into a near-analogue of Nazi Germany. Meanwhile Lucy comes to realise that David’s obvious innocence is no guarantee of protection under the law and the pair have to begin a desperate flight. While Carmichael finds witnesses dying mysteriously and starts to recognise the scale of the forces ranged against him and in the end his own outsider status is what makes him most vulnerable.

As the novel ends we are left with a nasty but all too believable taste in the mouth. The world that Walton so convincingly presents is one in which we won the war but still allowed a small but powerful group at the heart of the establishment to subvert all that we thought we were fighting for. (This novel is not an overt satire, but parallels with contemporary politics do seem uncomfortably close.) This is not to say that Farthing is perfect: Walton too clearly despises her right-wing aristocrats, for example, so that we see them only as decadent and cunning though there must surely be a genuine intelligence at work for them to so easily achieve their ends. And the political situation is, at times, hazy, it is certainly not clear how all left-of-centre politics could have been so quickly and thoroughly demonised. Nevertheless, the tiny window Jo Walton has chosen to open reveals a vast and fascinating landscape, this is an alternate history of genuine and chilly power.