‘Come and see me again before you decide anything,’ the Rector had said; but he had at least been helpful in one direction. He had answered Brat’s main question. If it was a choice between love and justice, the choice had to be justice.

Brat Farrar (written in 1949) was not a perfect read. I have had issues with the some of the reactions of the characters, and I believe some of the timing of the story is off, too.

The story is set in post-WWII Britain, which puts some of the story at a time during the height of WWII. I'm not disputing that this is possible, but Tey doesn't mention anything about the ongoing war when relating those parts of the story - and this is not typical for Tey whose main character in another series, Allan Grant, suffers from PTSD after WWI.  

What it does read like is a story that was originally drafted in the 1930s and then was revised for publication in 1949...except that some of the historical facts were silenced.

However, the story itself was really interesting: it's not the usual whodunit. We know from the start that Brat Farrar is an impostor. What we don't know is what happened to the character that he is trying to pass off as. This is revealed very slowly while were waiting to see if any of the Ashby family recognise Brat as a fraud.

I loved that concept. 

I also loved the way that Brat introduces himself to the villain of the piece:

‘I suppose you wouldn’t like, in return for my confidences, to tell me something?’

‘Tell you what?’

‘Who you are?’

Brat sat looking at him for a long time. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’ he said.

‘No. Who are you?’

‘Retribution,’ said Brat, and finished his drink.

You see, I was tickled by the coincidence that Agatha Christie pursued a similar line in her book Nemesis (with Miss Marple playing the part of Nemesis). Nemesis being the name for the goddess of retribution. 

There are no connections or similarities between Tey's and Christie's books other than the reference to mythology, but I liked that both authors picked up on the same theme.

‘Funny,’ he said, as Brat plunged the shoe into the water, ‘if any Ashby was to earn his living at this job it ought to have been your brother.’

‘Why?’

‘You never showed much interest.’

‘And did Simon?’

‘There was a time when I couldn’t keep him out of this place. There wasn’t anything he wasn’t going to make, from a candlestick to gates for the avenue at Latchetts. Far as I remember, all he ever made was a sheep-crook, and that not over-well. But he was always round the place. It was a craze of his for the whole of a summer.’

‘Which summer was that?’

‘Summer you left us, it was. I’d misremember about it, only he was here seeing us put an iron on a cartwheel the day you ran away. I had to shoo him home for his supper.’

I suppose the last line was the author saving a discrepancy here. I just can't get my head around that "Patrick", i.e. Brat, has only been gone for 7 years but people seem to allow for him forgetting an awful lot about his life before that. It does not add up. 

Also, Simon is very suspicious and I would have expected him to be able to tell if Brat is his brother or not. It's not like they were separated at a young age.

And why does no-one ask Simon why he thinks that Brat isn't/couldn't be his brother when he first hears about him?

I'm woefully behind with writing reviews but I have been away from home so ... I may finally have some time to catch up on reviewing over the weekend. I'm excited to say that my plans for this weekend are limited to the following:

- cleaning the flat/unpack/throw things into the washing machine

- sleep

- cook

- read

All of which will mostly be accomplished in my pjs. I am knackered and in need of comfort. 

So, I'm starting this quest with a Josephine Tey mystery. Brat Farrar is not set in London, so I'm going to use it for the Genre: Suspense square.

Today I’ve been reading Josephine Tey’s “Brat Farrar”, a mystery novel, published in 1949, about a young man who pretends to be the assumed-to-be-dead heir to a minor English estate.

The thing that strikes me most about it is the distinctive flavour of Tey’s English. Listening to it is like travelling in time. The words are, for the most part, unchanged from current usage but the rhythms of the prose, the expectations the writer has of the reader’s attention span and the taken-for-granted use of complex sentence structures, speak of a time when clothes were tailored, food was prepared by servants and education was what demonstrated that you were one of us. This is language as time travel.

Take a look at the start of Chapter Four, where we first get inside the head of our main character (Yes, we spend three chapters without knowing who the main character is or what his thoughts are. The first half of chapter one is spent describing a family breakfast at which Brat Farrar is neither present nor mentioned). Let yourself savour the way Tey brings Brat into focus:

“The boy lay on his bed in the dark, fully dressed, and stared at the ceiling.

 

There were no street lamps outside to illuminate this back room under the slates; but the faint haze of light that hangs over London at night, emanation from a million arcs and gas-lights and paraffin lamps, shone ghost-like on the ceiling so that its cracks and stains showed like a world map.

 

The boy was looking at a map of the world too, but it was not on the ceiling. He was examining his odyssey; conducting a private inventory. That meeting to-day had shaken him. Somewhere, it seemed, there was another fellow so like him that for a moment they could be mistaken for each other. To one who had been very much alone all his life that was an amazing thought.”

This is a world away from those frantic thrillers that must start with a blood-soaked prologue to reassure the reader that this is a book with action in it and then dive straight into a stream-of-barely-consciousness that immerses us in the trivia that flows through the mind of either hero or villain.

This is a world where the author has a story to tell and you, by virtue of having opened the book, have volunteered to follow the path the author has set out for you, as if she were your guide to an ancient city, in the firm expectation that she knows where she’s going.

In the second paragraph, she deftly leads you into the room, as if you were riding a photon generated by one of those London street lamps and establishes a sense of place.

In the third paragraph, she helps you slip into Brat’s interior landscape, letting you know that this too she will help you navigate.

At this point, I felt myself relax. This is not a novel in which the writer is playing Find The Lady with my curiosity. It is a story where all I have to do is follow in the writer’s footsteps and all will be shown to me.

The difference between this and a modern novel is not just one of structure or even intent. It is a difference that comes from the fluidity of English itself.

We no longer talk or think the way Tey and the people in her world talked or thought. They are our distant cousins, using a dialect that we understand but which, in subtle ways, we find ourselves translating.

Perhaps I’m more sensitive to the malleability of English than usual at the moment. Having just returned to England after an absence of sixteen years, in which I spent most of my time working with people for whom English was a second language, I find that my version of English has mutated to the point where, if it were a mammal, its ability to mate with the local species of English would be in doubt.

My “native English”, dating from when I last lived here, is archaic and, along the way. I have acquired a tendency to use phrases that are more French or German than English: “We have the possibility to…” “We have, since many years, been…” “I am coming to understand that…”

The language spoken locally seems effortless vibrant and endlessly flexible by comparison. Few here speak an English they’ve been taught or even think consciously about how they say what they say. The result is an outpouring of the here and now that is only truly to be comprehended by those who are here and now.

So Josephine Tey has taught me that: language is time travel, that I can only understand other times “in translation” with a lag of meaning and a loss of nuance and that no one can step into the same river of language twice.

On the whole, I find that quite exciting.

Both Brat Farrar and The Franchise Affair were on my 2017 Halloween Bingo long list, but so were many other books ... oh well.  Both of these are stand-out books, in that (1) they're not, or not substantively, part of Josephine Tey's Inspector Grant series (in Franchise Affair Grant appears, but only as a minor character; in Brat Farrar he doesn't feature at all), and (2) more importantly, even though the bulk of both books is told from a man's perspective, they feature several strong female characters who are head and shoulders above and beyond what was expected of a woman at the time of their writing (1948-49, respectively) even in ordinary life; never mind in times of adversity.

Brat Farrar is a Martin Guerre / Sommersby type of tale set on a manor and stud farm on the Southern English coast; the difference being here, however, that the reader (unlike the family) is explicitly aware of the identity and most of the prior history of the  eponymous allegedly "returned son and heir" -- in fact, we're unequivocally being asked to empathize with him, on the basis of his character as much as on the basis of his prior history, and take his side in opposition to his alleged younger twin brother Simon, whom (if the gamble comes off) he is poised to replace as the stud farm's new owner as from his 21st birthday, which in turn is -- obviously -- right around the corner at the book's beginning.  Both in the setup and in the resolution of the story (which I could see coming on pretty much from the word "go"), there is a bit too much reliance on coincidence for my taste; however, in between the bits of coincidence, Tey crafted a powerful, quiet novel, featuring both a compelling mystery -- above and beyond the title character's identity -- and engaging characters, in the  male protagonist, Brat, as well as in the two leading ladies, Bee (who has taken over management of the farm after the death of her nephew Simon's and his siblings' parents), and her niece, Simon's sister Eleanor, the farm's chief horse trainer (besides Simon himself).

The Franchise Affair is based on the true story of the 1753 disappearance of a servant girl named Elizabeth Canning, who had claimed to have been kidnapped by two women and held in their house for a month, which initially resulted in the two women's arrest and conviction of theft and kidnapping; but after a new investigation they were pardoned and Canning was instead convicted of perjury, resulting in a one-month prison sentence and her deportation to Connecticut.  Tey leaves no doubt that she considers the girl's story a complete fabrication; yet, for the longest time this is merely the personal view of her protagonist, the accused women's attorney Robert Blair, who battles against the one fallacy that also beset the defense of the real-life alleged kidnappers: proof where, if not being held captive by his clients in their house, "The Franchise", as she alleged, young Betty had been instead (in the novel, Elizabeth Canning becomes Betty Kane).  And, just as the real Elizabeth Canning case had resulted in an unparralelled pamphleteering and mudslinging campaign for and against Elizabeth on the one hand and the two accused women on the other hand, so, too, Tey's novel makes no bones about the destructive nature of the tabloid press, in words that evoke eerily familiar images and connotations, in the age of social media more than ever:

   "The Ack-Emma was the latest representative of the tabloid newspaper to enter British journalism from the West.  It was run on the principle that two thousand pounds for damages is a cheap price to pay for sales worth half a million.  It had blacker headlines, more sensatiional pictures, and more indiscreet letterpress than any paper printed so far by British presses.  Fleet Street had its own name for it -- monosyllabic and unprintable -- but no protection against it.  The press had always been its own censor, deciding what was and what was not permissible by the principles of its own good sense and good taste.  If  a 'rogue' publication decided not to conform to those principles then there was no power that could make it conform [...]

   And it was the Ack-Emma that blew the Franchise affair wide open.

   [...] He dropped the page, and looked again at that shocking frontispiece.  Yesterday The Franchise was a house protected by four high walls; so unobtrusive, so sufficient unto itself that even Milford did not know what it looked like.  Now it was there to be stared at on every bookstall; on every news-agent's counter from Penzance to Pentland.  Its flat, forbidding front a foil for the innocence if the face above it [Betty's photo]."

 

   "Today's Ack-Emma had not been calculated to have an appeasing effect on the mob mind.  True, there were no further front-page headlines; the Franchise affair had moved itself to the correspondence page.  But the letters the Ack-Emma had chosen to print there -- and two-thirds of them were about the Franchise affair -- were not likely to prove oil in troubled waters.  They were so much paraffin on a fire that was going quite nicely anyhow.

   Threading his way out of the Larborough traffic, the silly phrases came back to him; and he marveilled all over again at the venom that these unknown women had roused in their writers' minds.  Rage and hatred spilled over on to the paper; malice ran unchecked through the largely-illiterate sentences.  It was an amazing exhibition.  And one of the oddities of it was that the dearest wish of so many of those indignant protesters against violence was to flog the said women within an inch of their lives.  Those who did not want to flog the women wanted to reform the police.  One writer suggested that a fund should be opened for the poor young victim of police inefficiency and bias [Betty Kane].  Another suggested that every man of good will should write to his Member of Parliament about it, and make their lives a misery until something was done about this miscarriage of justice.  Still another asked if anyone had noticed Betty Kane's marked resemblance to Saint Bernadette.

   There was every sign, if today's correspondence page of the Ack-Emma was any criterion, of the birth of a Betty Kane cult.  He hoped that its corollary would not be a Franchise vendetta."

 

   "[I]t would be a miracle, if, after the correspondence in the Ack-Emma, The Franchise was not the mecca of an evening pilgrimage.  But when he came within sight of it he found the long stretch of road deserted; and as he came nearer he saw why.  At the gate of The Franchise, solid and immobile and immaculate in the evening light, was the dark-blue-and-silver figure of a policeman.

   Deligthed that Hallam had been so generous with his scanty force, Robert slowed down to exchange greetings, but the greeting died on his lips.  Along the full length of the tall brick wall, in letters nearly six feet high was splashed a slogan. 'FASCISTS!' screamed the large white capitals.  And again on the further side of the gate: 'FASCISTS!'"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I own and have read the paperback editions of both books; I also listened to Carole Boyd's stellar narration, which brings a dimension entirely of its own to Tey's storytelling which enhances it considerably.

I'll be using both books towards the "T" square of the Women Writers Bingo, as well as The Franchise Affair towards the Fiction from Fact chapter / square of the Detection Club Bingo (which is actually taken from the cover of this book's paperback edition).