Ha’penny is Jo Walton’s follow-up to her award-nominated 2006 novel Farthing and is part of what has come to be referred to as the Small Change trilogy (due to conclude in august 2008 with Half A Crown). The series is set in an alternate version of 1940’s Britain where, following a successful act of appeasement, Britain is not only at peace with Hitler’s Germany, it is actively coming to resemble it. As with Farthing, the weakest element of this novel is undeniably the plot, which is largely by-the-numbers. However, to criticise this series for Walton’s hand-waving of complex political matters and its largely predictable plot-lines is to completely miss the point and, indeed, the beauty of this series. The Small Change series are not alternate history thrillers in the tradition of Robert Harris’ Fatherland but rather subtle mood pieces in the tradition of other high-concept works of alt history such as John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting and Keith Roberts’ Pavane. A welcome sequel to one of 2006’s best novels, Ha’penny is a beautifully cut but not overly ostentatious gem.
Much like Farthing, Ha’penny is a book that operates on two fronts. Firstly, it follows the first person narration of Viola Larkin, a debutante and actress, who becomes involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler and the British Prime Minister. Secondly, the book follows the third person narration of Inspector Carmichael, a secretly gay Scotland Yard detective who is trying to track down the people involved in the same assassination plot after two of the initial conspirators blew themselves up by mistake.
Whereas Farthing was a country house whodunit in the grand tradition of the kind of Loamshire plays that dominated the 1950’s London stage (the last remaining trace of which is Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap), Ha’penny is more of a political thriller that burns from both ends like Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal. However, while competently thought out and executed, in truth the plot is not actually thrilling and it serves more as a story upon which to hang the more important components of the book; namely the characters and the setting.
I’ll start with the excellent characterisation.
The main protagonist is Viola Larkin. An actress rather than a society girl, Larkin nevertheless fills a similar structural niche to Lucy Kahn in Farthing. Both Kahn and Larkin are people who are completely disengaged from politics and have little interest in what’s going on outside their tidy little worlds. In the case of Kahn this was a world of fellow debs and members of the aristocracy and with Larkin it is actors and professional theatre people. This lack of engagement means that both characters serve to provide readers with a set of eyes through which to learn the world. However, despite satisfying a structural need, neither of these characters are simple. Kahn in Farthing is the product of a highly structured up-bringing which she chooses to turn her back on out of love for her husband. Larkin, by contract, is part of a group of sisters (clearly analogues of the real world Mitfords) who were brought up completely wild. One of Viola’s sisters chooses to marry Heinrich Himmler (referred to throughout the book as “Heinie”) while another becomes a communist spy, suggesting that Viola’s apolitical nature is entirely voluntary. In this respect Lucy and Viola could not be more different as Lucy was brought up to be insipid but took herself out of it while Viola chose to be insipid and only became politicised when forced to at gun-point. Nevertheless, both made a stand against Fascism. This is not something that can be said of all the characters.
Inspector Carmichael is an equally interesting character as he is effectively a complete coward. At the end of Farthing, Carmichael worked out that it was the Farthing set who killed one of their own in order to force through new powers to cope with the threat of Jewish, Bolshevik and Anarchist terrorists (a British version of the Reichstag fire) but when threatened that he would be outed if he didn’t keep his mouth shut, the Inspector duly ignored his principles. In Ha’penny we see the same thing happen again as Carmichael plans to flee to New Zealand with his lover Jack. However, the Prime Minister offers to make him a senior member of the new British Gestapo and Carmichael meekly accepts. The ending of the book is particularly powerful in its display of Carmichael’s cowardice as the Inspector justifies joining the Gestapo on the grounds that he could turn a blind eye to the actions of others, but when given the chance to turn a blind eye to an attempt to assassinate Hitler he refuses and then promptly justifies it to himself by saying that it was too late for the death of Hitler to make any difference.
Carmichael effectively serves as a mirror to Farthing and Ha’penny’s main protagonists. Both novels are stories about people becoming politicised and making a stand against tyranny while Carmichael, a man not only in a position of authority but a member of an actively persecuted minority, refuses to take a stand again and again despite being given two chances to undermine the Fascist clique in charge of Britain. In fact, Carmichael is offered the job in the Gestapo precisely because the government know him to be a coward. If Jo Walton’s viewpoint characters are descriptions of how society might come to resist the rise of fascism, her Inspector Carmichael is a wonderful representation of how otherwise good people can aid the rise of fascism, even if they do not believe in it themselves.
Walton’s setting shows a similar attention to detail and a willingness to express those details in a subtle manner. Many political dystopias (including 1984 and Brazil) tend to dwell overly upon the visual aspects of living in a totalitarian state, meaning that authors feel obliged to fill the streets with Jack-booted soldiers and to hammer large Swastikas over easily recognisable landmarks with people being shot or marched off to death camps on every street corner. This style of dystopia is, in my opinion, tired. It is also politically toothless as all it means is that authoritarian governments are now mindful to adopt the rhetoric and symbolism of liberalism as a way of masking their attacks upon our freedoms. It’s no accident that a large chunk of George W. Bush’s legislation carries names diametrically opposite to the actual content of the legislation (viz. The Patriot Act that treats all Americans as potential traitors). Walton’s fascists do not inhabit Ministries of Truth where they are guarded by men with gas masks and machine guns, instead they look very much like any other set of 1940’s politicians. Their evil lies not in what they say and what they look like but rather in the detail of what they do.
Walton’s dystopia is not one of obvious symbols or transparent brutality but rather one of mood. Indeed, the entire book is soaked in this astonishingly claustrophobic and unpleasant atmosphere that left me feeling really quite nauseated. Walton’s image of British Fascism is one grounded in fear and human failings as the book is full of good people who turn a blind eye to bad things and of minorities and dissidents who cling tightly to moments of happiness as mundane as eating ice-cream or having sex because they know that if they step out of line for one second and are caught then they’re in serious trouble. Of course, no British politician supports what the Germans are doing to the Jews of the continent but it would be rude to question them on the matter and if Jewish or gay criminals find their way over to the continent and disappear... well... that’s a matter for the Germans rather than the British government that sent them there.
This vision of life under a fascist regime is reminiscent of the one described by Marcel Ophuls’ famous documentary The Sorrow and the Pity. The film looked at life under the Petain government and suggested that the French were not collaborating with Nazism because they were in fear of ever-present Germans. Indeed, Ophuls points out that most large French towns did not see any Germans at all after the initial invasion. France’s slide into Fascism was not carried out at gun-point but rather at a cultural level as many French simply started acting more openly upon their anglophobia and anti-Semitism while the puppet government preyed upon fears of Bolshevik insurrection and Soviet Invasion to justify brutalising its own citizenry.
This is a form of Fascism that is a lot rarer in literature than its more visually obvious cousin and as a result it carries a lot more power emotionally as well as as an examination of the way that the Fascism meme adapts itself to different cultures and as a critique of modern US/UK politics which has undergone a similar lurch to the right since 9/11. As with Farthing, a lot of the politics don’t stand up to close scrutiny (for example, given that everyone knows about the death camps, why would the opposition keep its mouth shut?) but Ha’penny and Farthing are no more political theses than they are political thrillers.
As a political thriller, Ha’penny is under-written and has a pace that makes it almost impossible to build effective tension. However, to dismiss the book on these grounds is to completely miss its true beauty, which is actually reinforced by the sedate pacing and light plot. As a description of a believable Fascist Britain, Ha’penny is well researched, well observed and astonishingly powerful. A deeply atmospheric and subtle novel full of fascinating and beautifully drawn characters it only further reinforces the idea that the Small Change series should be included in the Pantheon of great British dystopias. Even if Walton is now living in Canada.
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