Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar (1949) is one of my favourite books. It isn’t science fiction or fantasy, it was published as a mystery novel. It also falls into the special genre I call “double identity.”
Brat Farrar is a young man with a pronounced family resemblance to the Ashby family, of Lodings. A brother of about his age supposedly committed suicide—his body was never found—at the age of thirteen. If twenty-one year old Brat were the dead Patrick, he’d inherit the estate and all the money over the head of the smiling confident Simon Ashby. Brat encounters Alec, a rogue who knows the Ashbys well and Alec immediately concocts a plot. Brat is drawn into the affair at first from curiosity and later from a desire to avenge Patrick. This is a murder mystery as well as a double identity story, but the murder Brat is investigating is that of his own double, and he can’t reveal the truth without revealing his own deception.
The wonderful thing about Brar Farrar is the detail. The family at Latchetts is drawn very realistically, down to the details of their table manners and table talk—and this is a large part of the charm of the book. It draws you in to the story of them as people, as a family—the aunt who has been in loco parentis for eight years, the twin eleven year olds who are so different from each other, the sensible Eleanor, the charismatic Simon. Brat himself is fundamentally nice, and Tey shows him going through contortions to accept the deception. This is a double identity book where the family feels real and the possibility of revelation through the minefield keeps you on the edge of your chair.
The way Brat manages the deception, with intensive coaching from Alec Loding, feels realistic—we’re given just enough detail, and the details are very telling. The little horse he “remembers,” and its mock pedigree, “Travesty, by Irish Peasant out of Bog Oak” is just the right kind of thing. And the resemblance, being a general family resemblance and not a mysterious identical one, with the eventual explanation that he is an Ashby cousin, seems plausible. The growing sense that he is Patrick’s partisan and his need to find out the truth of Patrick’s death, is all very well done. The trouble with this kind of story is “usurper comes home and gets away with it and then what?” Tey gives a very satisfying “what,” an actual mystery that resolves well, an impressive climax, and a reasonable resolution.
Brat Farrar is set in the time it was written, though actually contemplating the world in which it took place gave me a great idea for a series of my own. I don’t know quite when Tey thought she was setting it. We see some technological evidence of 1949, but the atmosphere is that of the thirties. There’s some evidence that WWII happened—a dentist was bombed in the Blitz—but it doesn’t seem to have had the social effect it did in reality. This is a 1949 in which people cheerfully went on holiday in France eight years before and in which a thirteen year old running away seven years before could cross France and get work on a ship there—in 1941 and 1942? Surely not. I managed to read this book umpteen times without noticing this, but once I did I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Anybody who would like more books set in my Small Change universe can read this as one. It was partly to recreate the atmosphere of reading the domestic detail and comfortable middle-class English horsiness of Brat Farrar with the thought of Hitler safe at the Channel coast and nobody caring that I wrote them. Of course, this makes re-reading Brat Farrar odd for me now. But even so it absolutely sucked me in for the millionth time and I read it at one gulp.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
I had wondered the same thing when I read it. Is there any way for her to have meant to have set it a few years before, enough to leapfrog the war? If it was published in 1949, but set in, say, 1946 or 7, it seems more plausible.
That introduces a new problem, with two twenty-one-year-old boys who would have been eighteen during the war, and no explanation of why they weren’t in the army, of course. So maybe it just can’t be made to work well.
“Brat Farrar” is one of my all-time favorite mystery novels. However until reading this I never noticed how the era it was set in didn’t make too much sense especially LizardBreath’s comment on why the boys weren’t drafted into the war effort nor any other mention of the effect of the war on the family.
I too loved the line Travesty, by Irish Peasant out of Bog Oak though it took me a time or two to see just how clever it was.
Tey’s “Daughter of Time” is often referred to and “The Franchise Affair” has been made into a couple of movies but I think “Brat Farrar” is her most unforgettable. It was also made into a miniseries but unfortunately the show didn’t capture what I loved about the novel.
WWII was so disruptive of everything that the events of the story couldn’t have happened as described if it had happened, not just the France thing, though that’s the most obvious, but the boys as you say, and the general timeless calm of the countryside, and even little things like Nancy Ledingham’s coming out couldn’t have happened between 1939 and 1945 — and yet the dentist was bombed in the Blitz, so it isn’t still the thirties.
(I’ve thought about this a lot, as I said.)
Maybe the dentist was a mistake. Remember Brat’s mother was said to have been killed in ”the war”, which would have had to be WWI. The feel of the whole book was pre-1940s and WWII.
I wonder if there’s any evidence that she wrote it long before it was published, and just updated it with the dentist reference in the late forties.
LizardBreath: There’s strong evidence against that — I have read all of Tey in publication order, and doing that you can see the way she improved steadily at her craft as she went on.
I think it was like the way you sometimes get older writers writing about young people and imagining their lives in terms of the decade when the older person was young — people writing about raves as if they’re just discos with different music, or writing about drugs in highschool as if it was still the sixties. She wanted to write a pastoral novel and she set it “now” without really thinking about whether it made sense. I mean mainstream writing, setting things in the real world and real time, is very odd when you think about it, because the characters have to be shaped by history, and you can’t shape the world to the way you want the characters to be. Weird.
I’m not complaining — as I said, I’ve written a trilogy explicitly set in the 1949 Tey imagined she was living in.
It reads like something partly written in the 1930s, maybe a complete version, and lightly edited to throw in a reference to the war.
It’s just possible to fit the story around the war, with Patrick’s death before the war and the 21st Birthday in 1946, but there’s so much missing. Not even a mention of ID Cards and Ration Books.
Though there is a way of fitting the story into the War. Brat Farrar joins the US Army, and that gets him to England in about 1943. But can he claim to be Patrick Ashby without looking, to his fellow soldiers preparing to invade France, to be a coward? And what is Simon doing? (Possibly wangling a nice, safe, job in an Army headquarters somewhere.)
Heck, there’s that Alan Ladd movie, The Red Beret, in which he plays an American who enlists in the British Army. But putting the story into an Army camp would throw away all the interesting elements of the original.
When I read the book, I almost skim over the isolated references to the war. It’s a 1930s mystery novel.
Dave: Every month of Brat’s life in France, Mexico and the US is accounted for. He did not join the army. She could have done that if she wanted to.
And she definitely didn’t write it earlier, the textual evidence is against it.
Brat Farrar is my favorite Tey. Partly, it’s the horses- I still love me a pony story- but mostly it’s Brat’s character. Plus of course, Ruth and Jane, the twins.
The boarding school, where no one has to learn, is what threw me. I always thought of that type of education as a more 1960’s phenomenon.
I don’t think that I want to imagine Brat and Co as inhabiting the Small Change universe- they would end up being discovered as secret Jews. and it would all be over.
Pam: No, it’s much worse than that. They live there, just like that, nothing stops them, they just keep on living like that while Jews and other people… don’t.
They had schools like that in the thirties. Summerhill is the famous one.
There are similar though less marked peculiarities in the setting of The Franchise Affair; here, again, the Blitz has happened (conveniently, to orphan an evacuee) approximately ten or a dozen years earlier but there is no mention of rationing and neither the forty year old solicitor or his 27 year old cousin appear to have served in the War or done National Service.
With regard to Brat Farrar, Brat actually has to be slightly older than Patrick/Simon – he runs away after he has left the grammar school and when he’s been working in an office for some time; arguably at the age of 15 or so. This doesn’t make the War bit any less baffling; it simply means there’s an even longer spread of time to account for.