The play's the thing

[bibliogramma]

Ha’Penny, Jo Walton

This, the second volume in Walton’s Small Change trilogy – an alternate history of a fascist post-WWII Britain – continues its brilliant and merciless examination of a society that has come to accept the unacceptable, tolerate the intolerable, and keep on smiling as if nothing could ever be wrong.

The first novel in the series, Farthing, made use of the literary conventions of the English country house murder mystery to show the cumulative effect of every individual decision, every petty threat, ever minor compromise, every small change that results in the creation of a fascist regime in which people voluntarily accept the curtailment of freedom and condone murder and state terrorism to gain an illusory security.

Ha’penny takes the form of yet another well-established genre, the suspense thriller, to explore the moral issues at the core of life under an unjust and illegitimate government. Walton uses the same structure she adopted in the first novel, alternating the narrative point of view between two characters. The first, Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard would seem, by his centrality to the action of both volumes to day, to be the central figure of the trilogy. The second viewpoint character in the novel is new to us, although she has some connection to some of the events of the first novel - actress Viola Lark, estranged daughter of a well-placed and wealthy family (based, it would seem, on the Mitfords), and about to begin rehearsals for the leading role in a gender-reversed Hamlet.

Carmichael, blackmailed into silence about his knowledge of the crimes at the heart of the new regime by his superiors, who are aware of his relationship with another man, finds himself in the position of acting against his own deepest beliefs to preserve the government that he, more than most, knows to be the result of a murderous coup. His only hope is that he can at least, by serving honestly in an unjust world, save some of the innocent who might otherwise be caught up in the wheels of an increasingly uncaring machine.

As Carmichael threads his way through the complexities of investigating a terrorist conspiracy, Viola’s narrative traces the path of seduction and compromise that leads an unconcerned and apolitical innocent into the heart of violent resistance. Through both narrative threads, the ethics and motivations of those who condone state terrorism and those who would commit terrorist acts in the name of freedom are explored with equal honesty, showing the effects of compromised ethical positions on all sides.

It’s an uncomfortable portrait of human nature, and poses a number of questions about the methods and ethics of resistance to an unjust government – leaving the answers up to the reader.