skygiants | (no subject)

This weekend I was trying to explain Brat Farrar to

genarti thusly: "It's sort of like what I imagine a Dick Francis novel is like? IT HAS LOTS OF HORSES IN IT."

genarti looked skeptical of the validity of this comparison, as indeed she might well, because, as you guys know, I have never in fact read a Dick Francis novel. But I liked Brat Farrar a lot so now my subconscious is probably going to be more warmly inclined towards Dick Francis in future.

Brat Farrar is one of those books where a conveniently missing-presumed-dead heir coincides with a convenient lookalike -- the titular Brat Farrar, a twenty-something horse-obsessed drifter who's been having a hard time finding work after an accident that gave him a permanent limp. Brat is discovered by an unscrupulous individual right as Simon Ashby, whose older twin Patrick fell off a cliff at the age of 13, is about to come of age and into Patrick's inheritance.

UNSCRUPULOUS INDIVIDUAL: All you have to do is sashay in and say that you're Patrick and you ran away instead of throwing yourself off a cliff and it was all a misunderstanding! NOBODY WILL KNOW.
BRAT FARRAR: This sounds very unethical and I am very uninterested.
UNSCRUPULOUS INDIVIDUAL: And then you would be come into all this money and be heir to the family's very lovely stables and --
BRAT FARRAR: ... wait hold the phone, did you say horses? Like, I could work in the stables?
UNSCRUPULOUS INDIVIDUAL: Um, I mean, yes, you would own the stable, and also have giant pots of money, so ...
BRAT FARRAR: You have stumbled on the one temptation I cannot resist, LEAD ME TO THE HORSES IMMEDIATELY.

So Brat, with a few mild twinges of conscience, sails into the impersonation game and meets the rest of the family, including Original Patrick's aunt and three younger sisters, and discovers .... awkwardly .... that, with the exception of Charming But Resentful Fake Twin Simon, he actually really, really likes all of them ...... and they all really like him ...........

(In some cases, of course, a little too much:

BRAT: Hmmm, I wonder why it bugs me so much when my littlest fake sisters tell me that cool, pretty, clever, possibly even more horse-obsessed than me Fake Sister Eleanor might have a boyfriend ...?
BRAT: WHOA WAIT. SELF. FAKE PATRICK. STOP THIS, FAKE PATRICK. DON'T MAKE IT WEIRD, FAKE BRO.)

And, you know, there is a mystery about what really happened to Original Patrick, and some suspense and maybe some attempted murder and so on, and all this is fun but really the stuff that's interesting about the book is this family, the conflict between Brat's increasing feelings like he does belong with this family (......except for the parts that are weird, DON'T MAKE IT WEIRD BRAT) and his underlying knowledge that his whole presence there is based on a lie. It's on both sides, too -- the other POV character besides Brat is Fake Patrick's Aunt Bee, who's been raising the kids for the past ten years, so you get to see the family's growing attachment to Fake Patrick through her, and what his return means to them; everyone is very sympathetic and it's super emotionally compelling.

Also there is a really fantastic horse that murders people for fun, I'm so fond of the murder horse.

(Things I'm less fond of: Josephine Tey's classism and the fact that, despite her many interesting female characters, she clearly considers girls who do not like horses to be a bit less sympathetic than girls who do, BUT YOU KNOW.)

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/441623.html

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From:

sdelmonte

Tey is an interesting writer, though after a while her books sort of blend into a genial mush with a very small number of highlights (like her questionable defense of Richard III against the charge of murdering the Two Princes). Overall, I find her works to be enjoyable, but they lack the memorable characters of the better Christie novels and strong plots of Sayers, and certainly pale in comparison to later writers in the same area of mystery such as Highsmith.

From:

skygiants

This is only the second of her books I've read, and the first was Daughter of Time about fifteen years ago, so to me she is a charming new-ish discovery!

From:

pedanther

I've always liked Brat Farrar - as you say, it's the family dynamics that make it - but it's getting to the point where I can't re-read it without noticing all the places where sympathetic characters are actually quite mean to other characters whom the author has marked as Not One of Us.

Do you know about Jo Walton's theory that Brat Farrar is set in an alternate universe? It comes out of the way that Tey set it sort of half-heartedly after WWII, so that people mention Hitler and the War occasionally but there's no real sign of the effects the War actually had on England - and then there's the bit where someone casually mentions a holiday to France eight years ago, in a book published in 1949.

Jo figured out that all of these references could be reconciled by positing an alternate timeline where England got a different government after Chamberlain resigned, which signed a peace agreement with Germany early on, leaving England sitting pretty while Hitler got on with ravaging the continent.

(Then she actually wrote a novel of her own set in that timeline - Farthing, which is a deconstructed country house murder mystery, is excellent and I really should get around to reading the sequels one of these days.)

I remember once Jo was explaining all this online, and somebody remarked that they didn't like to think of the horrible things that might happen to our beloved Ashbys in an England ruled by people who didn't mind Hitler. And Jo said no, it was much worse than that: for the Ashbys, and the people the Ashbys cared about, it wouldn't make any difference.

From:

skygiants

I've read and enjoyed both Farthing and sequels (the second is probably my favorite -- AU Mitford Sisters!), but had no idea that it emerged from this theory about Brat Farrar! That's amazing (and terrifyingly plausible.)

(My secret favorite character is the Terrible Shallow Teenager who can't ride horses and dreams about seducing Simon. She's more straightforward than anybody! In a book primarily centered around TWO HUGE LIES you would think SOMEONE would recognize that that sort of honesty is a virtue.)