National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month/Farthing

[cahn]

julianyap has declared this month National Put Quotes in Your Blog Month. Who am I to argue? I love this kind of stuff. So, all my posts this month will have a quotation in them. From something.

A Caligula... can rule a long time, while the best men hesitate to do what is necessary to stop him, and the worst ones take advantage.

So, let me talk about Farthing (Walton) (which the above quote is not from). I actually liked it, though it sometimes is a little (or, uh, more than a little) heavy-handed in its moralizing (but, hey, lately I've been reading Doctorow and Ayn Rand, so apparently I'm on a kick for heavy-handed political moralizing in my fiction). I liked it because I took immediately to the main character, a woman who tends to start explaining things in the middle-- guess why I liked her?-- and because I just loved her relationship with her (dead) brother. Those were the best parts of the book for me.

Farthing failed a great deal in trying to be both a mystery and a political thriller. It did okay in the second, if you're in the mood for reading about that kind of thing, and did very well at depicting the kind of darkening of worldview that happens gradually enough that you might not notice if you're not directly affected-- but the first was terrible. It's a pleasant surprise when a book you don't think is a mystery, like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, turns out to be, and a rather annoying disappointment when something you thought was a mystery isn't really (no plot twistiness, no actual mystery plot, really). And the characters of the Evil people served the political ends, not the literary ones, and so were less well drawn than Agatha Christie's, and it's not like she was the queen of nuance. (The character of the mother, in particular, was a cartoon version of the way teenagers think about their mothers.) So-- although I liked it, I can't recommend it unreservedly to someone who is like me. Also, the first sexual entanglings were interesting, but by the fifth one I was like, "is everyone in this book entangled in some irritating way??"

The book from which the above is taken (and which I cite because I woke up the morning after reading Farthing with it in my head) is somewhat more roughly written than Farthing, but in many ways has a rather more nuanced approach to evil (and evil in families/politics in particular).

ETA: Shards of Honor (Bujold). I think half the things that get quoted in our household are Bujold...

Comments

[julianyap.livejournal.com]

I have no idea where this comes from, but given that you read a lot of Bujold and that it is a very Bujoldian sentiment I shall guess a Vor book.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Ha! Always a good guess. In fact you are right (going to update the post now)

[ase.livejournal.com]

It's been a while since I read Farthing (also, I am behind on LJ commenting), and I am not a native mystery reader, so what was interesting to me may be old hat for the genre. With that said, I liked it for its relatively 3d characters, but I haven't reread it because it's interesting without being groundbreaking, if that makes any sense. The novel did not tweak or expand my worldview. It was entertaining, though, and sometimes one doesn't need one's worldview expanded.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

I think that if I came at it without recognizing all the mystery trappings (and expecting, therefore, a mystery) I would have liked it rather more. I did think the main character was quite 3d and very neat, and it was certainly worth reading. But yeah, I don't think I'll reread it for a while.