I love Five Books. I started to get their email update when I was working, and unsubscribed because it was just too frustrating (there wasn't nearly enough time to read books just for pleasure back then). A while ago, I signed up again, and it's now a major contributor to my humongous "to-read" list.

Under the rubric of "Books Like The Thursday Murder Club", I found listed Brat Farrar, by Josephine Tey (published in 1949, and available for free from Gutenberg Australia -- which, I recently discovered, carries different titles from its Gutenberg.org parent).

Josephine Tey and Gordon Daviot are pseudonyms of novelist and playwright Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896-1952). Born in Inverness, she taught Physical Training at various schools before returning home to look after her parents. Tey was famous for preserving her privacy (she avoided the press, and never gave interviews). She never married, and we know of no romantic associations, although Sir John Gielgud (a lifelong friend) did suggest that she might have been bereaved in World War I. In any case, "Tey's novels feature a series of independent women who actively avoid marriage". She enjoyed fishing, horse-racing, and other country pursuits, and she died -- characteristically privately -- of liver cancer (most of her friends were unaware that she was even ill).



Brat Farrar is a rollicking good story. I won't give anything away, but the basic plot is this:

An orphaned young man (Brat) is tempted into impersonating a teenage suicide (Patrick), in order to claim, on reaching the age of 21, the inheritance that would otherwise go to Patrick's twin brother (Simon). Aiding and abetting this scheme -- indeed instigating it, having recognized Brat's extraordinary likeness to Simon -- is a ne'er-do-well cousin (Alec), who is well placed not only to spot the opportunity, but also to tutor Brat in the intimate ways of the Ashby family. Brat-as-Patrick's cover story is that he didn't kill himself, but instead ran away to sea. And as Brat really did run away to sea, he has lots of factual evidence to offer for that part of his story.

It's suspenseful, as Brat's character engages our sympathies despite his nefarious undertaking, and we're kept nicely on tenterhooks as we follow his initial meetings with the lawyer, the family, and the neighbours. Initially looking for a fast buck and a taste of the good life, Brat comes to appreciate that he has within his guilty grasp something much more valuable: The sense of being part of a family, of finally achieving that feeling of belonging that has eluded him up until now.

But then the plot thickens...

I guessed the scenario (though not the details) quite early on. It's nice when an author drops sufficient clues for readers to do that, rather than leaving them dependent on a series of rabbits-out-of-hats that couldn't possibly have been predicted.

And there's a kind-of-happy ending for all except the chief villain.



But Brat Farrar is also worth reading for its atmosphere. The Ashby family, into which Brat insinuates himself, is a genteel-but-not-rich group of people, who are very much at home in their equestrian business in the southern English countryside (they breed, sell, and train horses, as well as giving riding lessons). So it's a nice picture of rural life. The Ashby residence is impressive, though not grand: "The car ran out of the thin spring green of the avenue into the wide sweep in front of the house, and there in the too-bright gusty sunlight stood Latchetts; very quiet, very friendly, very sure of itself."

The actual grand house, the former seat of the Ledinghams of Clare, is now "a boarding-school for the unmanageable children of parents with progressive ideas and large bank accounts" (Tey takes several swipes at this establishment in the course of the novel). But there's still a palpable "old England" feel to the village. At one point Aunt Bee (who has brought up Simon and his siblings since the untimely death of their parents) goes to collect her thoughts in the village church: "The light of the sunset flooded the grey vault with warmth, and the whole building held peace as a cup holds water. She sat down on a bench by the door and listened to the silence. A companionable silence which she shared with the figures on the tombs, the tattered banners, the names on the wall, the Legion's garish Union Jack, and the slow ticking of a clock." Brings back so many memories of quiet moments in British Isles churches...



It's a very horsey book, and although I have little interest in equine matters, I found the details surprisingly fascinating. And there's a nice bit of distancing when one of the students at the strange school describes her experience of horse-riding: "You have no idea what it is like to be bumped about on a great shapeless mountain of a thing that's far too high from the ground and has nothing to hold on to." I, who have vowed never to ride any animal ever again, totally empathize...

The main characters are interesting, and help to make up for the stock roles in the supporting cast: The wise vicar, the deferential country-folk, the "slatternly girl" who waits tables at the hospital canteen... This last epithet is characteristic of a certain classism and sexism that crop up, somewhat gratingly, in the story from time to time. The young domestic help at Latchetts, for example, is described as "a brassy blonde in tight flowered rayon", and Bee -- generally so likeable -- at one point thinks, "that no one with her hands, or her breath, or her scent, or her manners, would ever be allowed to hand an Ashby a plate" (the despised Lana is quite feisty, though, in a way that points to changed post-war times).

As regards those times, the date of the story is a little vague. We're obviously post-World War II (one of the characters lost three sons in the first conflagration and all his grandsons in the one after that, and Brat's dental records can't be verified because the dentist had been bombed out -- "Poor old Hammond is to be no help to us -- they never found him, did you know? Everything was just blown to dust"). But if Brat snuck off to France eight years before the current action, then we can't very well be in 1949...

There's another slightly snobbish comment about a country house that "was now the possession of the nation in the shape of the National Trust; a shillingsworth of uplift for coachloads who didn't know Gibbons from Adam and wanted their tea". But Tey obviously didn't despise the process too much, as she bequeathed to the National Trust her estate and the proceeds from her writings.

We'll give the last words to the larcenous Alec: "Riches, my boy, don't consist in having things, but in not having to do something you don't want to do." True, that.