REVIEW: Small People Dealing with Looming Fascism Novel Watch

I do love Jo Walton's "Small Change" trilogy. & I do find it, once again, a very suitable read for our times. Save for the not-unhappy ending part...

I do love Jo Walton's "Small Change" trilogy. & I do find it, once again, a very suitable read for our times. Save for the not-unhappy ending part...

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Jo Walton’s “Small Change” series:

• Farthing: Publishers Weekly: Starred: “World Fantasy Award–winner Walton (Tooth and Claw) crosses genres without missing a beat with this stunningly powerful alternative history set in 1949…

• Ha’Penny: Publishers Weekly: “This provocative sequel to acclaimed alternate history Farthing (2006) delves deeper into the intrigue and paranoia of 1940s fascist Great Britain…. World Fantasy Award–winner Walton masterfully illustrates how fear can overwhelm common sense…

• Half a Crown: Publishers Weekly: “Walton's fine conclusion to her alternative-history trilogy…

I want to SPOIL ALL THE THINGS!!!! But I should not…

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So how about this:

We begin with the voice of an ingénue in an upper-class English country house:

It started when David came into the lawn absolutely furious. We were down at Farthing for one of Mummy's ghastly political squeezes...

Jo Walton's Farthing seems to open in our world, in an upper-class English milieu halfway through the century of the 1900s. Farthing opens as a drawing room romantic comedy. Hair. Pearls. Is the shallow? Is the petty? The "dim... complete nincompoop" antagonist Lady Angela Thirkle. The ingénue's family's and their circle's belief that her marriage to David is a mésalliance.

Then it shifts.

At the end of Chapter 1 we realize that all of it has been the ingénue's explanation—scatter-brained and digressive—of why her reaction to the murder of Sir James Thirkle was "it well and truly served [Angela] right".

At the start of Chapter 2 enter the detective: Inspector Peter Anthony Carmichael. Farthing is now an English police procedural murder mystery. Indeed, that is what <http://archive.org> classifies it as: “Topics: Police, Country Homes”.

And it is not our world. It is, rather, an alternate-history novel: We learn that Carmichael was "one of the last to get away from Dunkirk". We learn that it is 1949. We learn that England had "fought Hitler to a standstill". We learn that "Adolf admired England and had no territorial ambitions across the channel".

We learn that England and Hitler's Germany are good friends.

And so it shifts again: the ingénue's marriage to David is a Christian-Jewish marriage. That has suddenly become very fraught. Farthing is no longer a police procedural.

It is, rather a novel of looming fascist dystopia.

The last of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Four Freedoms is: Freedom from Fear—fear that someone might destroy the pattern of your life and so upend your pursuit of happiness, might imprison you and so take away your personal liberty, might execute you and so take away your life. Whatever other disagreements we might have about how to organize society, perhaps we all could agree that it needed at a minimum to provide us with Freedom from Fear: security for our resources, for our persons, and for our lives. Once we recognized that as the foundation—bought into the liberalism of fear—much could be built that would be solid, and good.

Or, rather it would be solid until it was not.

The Roman Republic was not a creature you wanted as a neighbor, and you really did not want it to come to visit. However, if you yourself were a citizen, and thus within the charmed circle, the Roman Republic secured your liberty: your Freedom from Fear. It had done so ever since King Tarquin the Proud had raped Lucretia Collatini and immediately been forced to flee for his life,

Or so the story went.

But then in the year -133 Roman land-reformer politician Tiberius Gracchus, with perhaps 200 of his followers, were murdered by a mob led by Tiberius's first cousin Nasica (and probably inspired by his first-cousin and brother-in-law Æmilianus). It was, in part, a family affair.

The historian Plutarch wrote 200 years later:

This is said to have been the first sedition at Rome, since the abolition of royal power, to end in bloodshed and the death of citizens; the rest... were settled by mutual concessions, the nobles yielding from fear of the multitude, and the people out of respect for the senate..."

One overreaction to a political fight had become a mass mob murder. The fall of the Roman Republic had begun.

And at the end no one could be free from fear.

After the murderer of Tiberius, land-reformer politicians drew the lesson that they needed bully-boys to keep right-wingers from doing to them what had been done to him. Better than bully-boys would be a loyal legion. Or three. Two generations later right-wing military-politician Sulla's loyal legions attacked and seized Rome, establishing his brutal and bloody temporary dictatorship. Three generations later Pompey and Caesar, each with a loyal army, fought it out. Four generations later Octavian won his four-cornered cage match, became the Emperor Augustus, and the Roman Republic was dead.

Thereafter no one was free from fear.

The Emperor could say one morning that he had dreamed that Senator So-and-So had conspired against him, and so had Senator So-and-So executed. Prudence and fear would keep tongues silent. .

The plots of the novels that make up Jo Walton's “Small Change” are of assassinations and murders foiled and not-foiled, of coverings-up and revealings, of people desperately seeking advantage, seeking survival, seeking to somehow resist in a world in which even the possibility of working toward freedom from fear appears to be slipping away. The themes are of how people resist, acquiesce, or enthusiastically embrace the approaching threat of fascist dystopia—and how, sometimes, the same people do all three, sometimes in turn, sometimes all at once.

I love these novels. I commend them to you, and hope you enjoy them at least a farthing as much as I do.

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References:

• Ploutarkhos ho Khaironeus. 1914 [ca. 108]. Lives: Agis & Cleomenes, Tiberius & Gaius Gracchus. Trans. Bernadotte Perrin. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. <https://archive.org/details/plutarchslives10plutuoft>.

• Roosevelt, Franklin D. 1941. "Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union." Congressional Record, 77th Congress, 1st session, January 6. <https://www.fdrlibrary.org/four-freedoms>.

• Shklar, Judith N. 1989. "A Life of Learning." Charles Homer Haskins Lecture. American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, no. 9. <https://www.acls.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Haskins_1989_JudithNShklar.pdf>.

• Shklar, Judith N. 1989. "The Liberalism of Fear." In Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum. Pp. 21–38. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. <https://philarchive.org/rec/SHKTLO>.

• Walton, Jo. 2006. Farthing. New York: Tor Books. <https://archive.org/details/farthing00walt>.

• Walton, Jo. 2007. Ha'penny. New York: Tor Books. <https://archive.org/details/hapenny00walt>.

• Walton, Jo. 2008. Half a Crown. New York: Tor Books. <https://archive.org/details/halfcrown00walt>.

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