I don’t like your trilogy either

Let’s get back to this whole “blogging” idea, shall we?

I found Jo Walton’s post about series that go downhill. I do not have much opinion on the books she refers to: when I read all the sequels to Ender’s Game, I didn’t like them, but didn’t find they ruined Ender’s Game for me. (Ender’s Shadow, on the other hand, did, and I have since stopped reading Orson Scott Card.) I do agree that Children of God absolutely ruined, in retrospect, The Sparrow, but I have cleverly blocked out most of the details of that book and content myself with rereading The Sparrow, and reading Mary Doria Russell’s other books, which are not science fiction and very nice.

No, I find this amusing because Jo Walton’s own Small Change series is one of those series for me. I very much enjoyed Farthing, and was happily recommending it to those few people I know who are even willing to pick up alternate history novels. I was on the fence about the second book, Ha’Penny, because another book about the flighty upper class girl (I use the word on purpose) who gets all mixed up in national security issues was a little irritating.  The voice of Viola was not nearly distinct enough from Lucy Kahn’s voice. (It seemed rather like Lucy’s voice would have been 10 years before the events of Farthing. I understand part of this, but really I prefer characters who are either more easily distinguishable from each other or who are less generic, even if they’re similar within a book or series.) In any case, though I didn’t enjoy book two as much, I didn’t object to it really, and looked forward to book three, Half a Crown.

And now we’re at the final book in the trilogy, and I will spoil it entirely for you. I do this because I think you should not read it. If you would like to read her book Tooth and Claw instead (Jane Austen Trollope where all the characters are dragons), I suggest you do that, as I have no complaints at all about that book and liked it very much.

I got to book three, and England has been entirely taken over by fascists. People seem to care, a little, but care more about not making a fuss. There isn’t much complaint at any level, though these books are mostly about the upper class, so what everyone else is doing is kept conveniently silent. Convenient because Elvira, this book’s flighty girly narrator, finds her biological family is actually lower class, and they don’t agree with all the fascism and they’re not anti-semites, really truly, and Elvira is presented to Queen Elizabeth (who is just recently the queen) and deus ex machina — regina ex machina? — Elizabeth makes a speech saying the fascist prime minister is going to be arrested for murder and that fascism and anti-semitism is wrong and hurray everything is all better.

The series was mostly Niemoller’s poem stretched out into three books with a happy ending. And until the happy ending, it really was rather effective: it wasn’t really all that unreasonable that people would go along with a fascist government that restricted civil liberties for people who weren’t straight and of the majority religion. You could imagine that, as time went on with the same government in power, children who grew up in it would find it normal. And really, most people only fight for friends or family. Some people are better, more honourable, but not most.

So I could follow all that, and the subtle details about how this world — in England, in Europe, in Russia, in the US — worked were very effective. The world-building was excellent. Although Lucy, Viola and Elvira were all too similar, the other characters had their own voices, and the other main character (Inspector Carmichael) was intriguing, as were many of the secondary characters. The writing style is engaging.

The problem was the ending. It was too abrupt. It was too much brought about by players who didn’t show up until the last quarter of the last book, and it implied too much magical fixing. It left out all the hard work. Sure: the hard work would have been another trilogy on top of that, and I didn’t actually expect to hear the details of rewriting laws, and the fights that would be inevitable as people with power had it taken away, of the one step forward, nine tenths of a step back movement — but I would have liked it to have been at least hinted at.