Great Book
I wrote all day yesterday, and by six I was unable to think any longer. So, I prepared my February pages for submission to Critical Mass, I built a fire in the fireplace, and listened to the wind howl around the house and alternated between watching the flames and watching the snow, and focussing on the book I was currently reading. It is FARTHING by Jo Walton, and it is stunning. Ian had read it first and passed it on to me, and I’m very grateful for the recommendation.
FARTHING is a British country house murder mystery set in an alternate time where Britain and Hitler reached a peace accord in 1940. Walton captures the voices perfectly and evokes the period wonderfully, and she has all these nods to those wonderful grand dames of British mysteries, Josephine Tey and Dorothy Sayers. She also tosses a few nods toward Georgette Heyer so on many levels Walton hooked me completely.
Because I am a mystery reader, (and have played in far too many of Walter Jon’s mystery games) I had figured out the motive and killer, and then I began to get the feeling that this book wasn’t going to end with the conventional “win” for the good guys. It’s a satisfying ending, but the issues she raised had me sitting by the fire and staring into the flames and thinking a lot about where our country finds itself after seven years of George Bush.
The steps she sketches for a takeover of a democratic government by non-democratic forces was chillingly familiar. We have a climate where we are demonizing brown people whether from Mexico or the Middle East. We have a return of really vicious nativism. We have a frightening level of mix between religion and politics, we have the courts being marginalized, and we have a distortion of the Constitutional grants of power between the three branches of government. Bush has deliberately and systematically aggrandized rights that are reserved to the legislature and brought them under the executive. People need to remember that these are three _co-equal_ branches.
Despite having read an absolutely terrific book I found myself very melancholy in the dark hours. And I have to say I’m getting tired of winter. I want to pull the blanket off Vento and let him play outside.
January 31st, 2008 at 12:00 pm
FARTHING (and the sequels — HA’PENNY is out and I recommend it) are indeed very well done.
But Walton gets fascism badly wrong; she apparently sees it as a form of extreme conservatism, which is laughably inaccurate. It’s actually more like Leninism.
“Aristocratic” or establishmentarian fascism is a contradiction in terms. The archetypical fascist party specialized in giant columns of guys in colored shirts, brawling in the streets, and winning elections, not intrigue in salons.
Fascism, in the countries where it actually came to power or came close to it, was always a _mass movement_ of plebian radicalism aiming at overturning old hierarchies and establishing new ones. They invariably hated the old order, and were very suspicious of big business unless firmly under their control.
The usual fascist leader or militant was like Mussolini or Hitler — a declasse type, typically a lower-middle-class ex-soldier, often with a background in extremist politics, on the left or right. The Nazis used to say that the best National Socialists were the ones who’d been saluting the red flag before they put the white circle and black swastika in it.
And a large chunk of the fascist appeal was its hostility to established elites; this was quite genuine, as those who thought they could “use” Hitler found out — Fritz Thyssen, for example, or the Prussian army officers who ended up hung on meathooks. It’s notable that the only Germans who actually tried to kill Hitler were Junkers, military aristocrats.
They’d always despised the “Bohemian corporal” and the feeling was mutual, though they each found the other useful for a while.
In the 30’s right-wing types often incorporated fasionable fascist symbols and vocabulary — as did liberals and progressives like H. G. Wells, notoriously. (He gave a speech at Oxford in the 1930’s calling for a new breed of “liberal Nazi”.)
But that didn’t make, say, Franco a fascist. He was a perfectly ordinary ultra-reactionary Iberian cauldillo, and chose the moment to betray the (genuinely fascist) Falange with exquisite precision. Most of their militants ended up dying in the war, or with the Blue Division of volunteers he sent to Russia.
(Hitler, after a meeting with him in which he vainly tried to get Franco to enter the war on the Axis side, said that he’d rather have three teeth drilled than spend another hour talking to Franco.)
January 31st, 2008 at 6:49 pm
I read Farthing and am now reading the sequel Ha’Penny. Farthing at least is an extremely good and very grim book. It’s one of my favorites of the current Prometheus Award nominees, as a cautionary tale warning against repressive government—not quite a dystopia, but its events clearly lead in a dystopian direction. I encourage you to look for the sequel as well; what I’ve read looks promising.
January 31st, 2008 at 10:34 pm
I plan to read Ha’Penny, although I want to get a little happier before I tackle another book in this universe.
Walton wasn’t writing about “traditional” fascism. She’s was writing about the repressive attitudes of the wealthy elite, and I can name any number of members of the “elite” who were in sympathy with Hitler — Lindberg, Joe Kennedy, Errol Flynn. Members of that equivalent class in Germany thought they could control HItler — they were very, very wrong.
Corporatism is a huge part of modern fascism, and we are seeing that in spades when we have lobbyists for industries _writing_ the legislation for those industries. Which screws over workers and consumers.
And before I get accused of being a fuzzy headed socialist let me remind everyone that I am a capitalist — I manage a natural gas and oil company for crap sake. But I also think companies and the owners of those companies need to remember that they are a part of the country and the community, and have an obligation to the greater good as well as to their share holders.
February 1st, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I just finished Walton’s Tooth and Claw and was just floored by how great it was. The lady can write!
Didn’t know Errol Flynn was a fascist. As for corporate fascism, it’s certainly possible. Though right now I feel like we’re headed more toward corporate feudalism. Every CEO for himself!