Half a Crown
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £4.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Half A Crown for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £4.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Jo Walton's 'Small Change' trilogy is a challenging one to classify. Her previous novels in the series, Farthing and Ha'penny, easily fit a number of genres - alternate history, murder mystery, suspense novel thriller - without entirely being defined by any one of them. This book, the final novel in her series, is no different. Less a murder mystery than a political thriller, it takes her concept of a Britain descending towards fascism and moves it a decade into the future. By 1960, Britain has been ruled by politician-turned-dictator Mark Normanby for a decade. Jews and other perceived undesirables are frequently rounded up and sent for disposal to the Continent, where the Nazis have triumphed in their long-running war against the Soviets. Most Britons have accepted fascist rule, with a police force that now regularly tortures suspects, and a body called the Watch which serves as a domestic Gestapo, and have even come to believe it to be beneficial. Peter Carmichael, the former Scotland Yard inspector turned secret policeman, runs a clandestine organization that struggles to help rescue people when possible, but he is faced with the twin challenge of a potential coup by the Duke of Windsor and the discovery of his secret life by his ward Elvira Royston, the orphaned daughter of his former police partner.
As with the other volumes, Walton develops her story by alternating between the first-person account of the naive Elvira and a third person narrative focusing on Carmichael. Yet there is no great mystery in this volume but a dual plot focusing on the emergence of the totalitarian "Ironsides" movement and Elvira's growing exposure with the realities of her world. Without the mystery, the emphasis is on suspense, yet Walton comes up short here. While she implies that her alternate Britain is a terrifying place, little of this seems to come out in the novel itself. Instead, everything seems almost laughably tame, from a secret policeman who is astonishing indiscreet and easily caught unawares to a underground coup that is hardly anything to fear. All of this saps the suspense from the story, making it a somewhat disappointing conclusion to an otherwise enjoyable and well-realized series.
As with the other volumes, Walton develops her story by alternating between the first-person account of the naive Elvira and a third person narrative focusing on Carmichael. Yet there is no great mystery in this volume but a dual plot focusing on the emergence of the totalitarian "Ironsides" movement and Elvira's growing exposure with the realities of her world. Without the mystery, the emphasis is on suspense, yet Walton comes up short here. While she implies that her alternate Britain is a terrifying place, little of this seems to come out in the novel itself. Instead, everything seems almost laughably tame, from a secret policeman who is astonishing indiscreet and easily caught unawares to a underground coup that is hardly anything to fear. All of this saps the suspense from the story, making it a somewhat disappointing conclusion to an otherwise enjoyable and well-realized series.
Format:Hardcover
I really could not put this book down and kept avoiding work to "just read a few more pages". I read it in a day.
Half a Crown is a step up in readability from Ha'Penny but not such a good book as Farthing, mainly because although there is a neat symmetry to the series with this concluding volume, the finale is too convenient.
In this book, ten years have passed since Ha'Penny and the world has become a much darker place. The government has an iron fist around liberty and debutantes think it amusing to watch Jews being pelted with rotten fruit of an evening. Again, it is just so easy to imagine that this is a road Britain would have gone down if it had capitulated with Nazi Germany and that is the brilliance of this, and the other novels in the series - they are all too plausible.
For a very readable final volume of a series you can't go wrong with this book, and while there is no mystery as such (perhaps why my library stored it in general fiction, whereas the first two books were classified in mystery) there is a build up of suspense. You just know something is going to happen as the plot lines involving Inspector Carmichael and his ward become rapidly more chaotic. The solid, if threatening world of the main two characters in this book disintegrates dramatically in the space of a few days and you wonder how JW will tie off the loose ends.
Unfortunately, this book relies on a magic bullet to resolve all the plot threads, and resolve it it does, but it really feels like a contrived ending. Would the sinister world of a Britain capitulating with Nazi Germany really ended this way? Read and decide for yourself. The ending is satisfying, even if it is not realistic - perhaps the opposite of the ending of a Suitable Boy then!
Half a Crown is a step up in readability from Ha'Penny but not such a good book as Farthing, mainly because although there is a neat symmetry to the series with this concluding volume, the finale is too convenient.
In this book, ten years have passed since Ha'Penny and the world has become a much darker place. The government has an iron fist around liberty and debutantes think it amusing to watch Jews being pelted with rotten fruit of an evening. Again, it is just so easy to imagine that this is a road Britain would have gone down if it had capitulated with Nazi Germany and that is the brilliance of this, and the other novels in the series - they are all too plausible.
For a very readable final volume of a series you can't go wrong with this book, and while there is no mystery as such (perhaps why my library stored it in general fiction, whereas the first two books were classified in mystery) there is a build up of suspense. You just know something is going to happen as the plot lines involving Inspector Carmichael and his ward become rapidly more chaotic. The solid, if threatening world of the main two characters in this book disintegrates dramatically in the space of a few days and you wonder how JW will tie off the loose ends.
Unfortunately, this book relies on a magic bullet to resolve all the plot threads, and resolve it it does, but it really feels like a contrived ending. Would the sinister world of a Britain capitulating with Nazi Germany really ended this way? Read and decide for yourself. The ending is satisfying, even if it is not realistic - perhaps the opposite of the ending of a Suitable Boy then!
2 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Half a Crown is well written and exciting to the last page. It also relies on a hugely implausible occurrence to keep the plot in motion. And the book is also disturbing, probably in a way the author did not intend.
The hole in plot is an extraordinary lapse of judgment by Watch Commander Carmichael, in which he deliberately reveals his true aims and activities to a complete stranger, and inadvertently to another person. Carmichael's out-of-character foolishness is a transparent and clumsy plot device. It moves the plot along, but it is a rip in the narrative that I was never able to put out of mind.
There are other weaknesses in the story. People travel in airships, which is a truly hackneyed way of signaling to the reader that this is a different world. Carmichael, the head of the British Gestapo, is fearful that any stranger at his door could be an assassin, but takes a long country drive with no security in sight. These are small things, but they stand out as failures by the author to maintain the perfect pitch she sustained in the first two books.
The troubling part of the story is that it strongly suggests that Britain could have been just fine if it had made peace with Hitler. In the Farthing world, by 1960 Britain is one of three global powers (with Germany and Japan); the country is prosperous; and the empire is secure and mainly subservient. Change one crucial detail - give Britain a democracy rather than a fascist government - and Britain in the Farthing world is arguably much better off than in the real world where it fought Hitler and bankrupted itself. The author did not have to go this route with the story - that is, fascist Britain did not have to be wealthy and powerful - and it is too bad she did.
One other jarring note is the depiction of the United States. The U.S. is apparently a third-rate power, has lost wars with Japan and Britain, is coming apart at the seams, and to add insult to injury someone has nuked Miami. I don't know the author's intentions, but she has painted a picture of the United States that I suspect matches what much of the European elite thinks ought to have happened to the upstarts across the ocean.
I have a final criticism. The author never explained how James Thirkie was induced to commit suicide by gassing himself in a car. Having gone through the trouble of setting up this extraordinary situation, the author never does anything with it. Thirkie becomes even more intriguing when we learn that not only did he negotiate peace with Hitler, but his sister-in-law was married before the war to Himmler. There was a lot more that could have been done with this character, but the author did not take the opportunity.
The hole in plot is an extraordinary lapse of judgment by Watch Commander Carmichael, in which he deliberately reveals his true aims and activities to a complete stranger, and inadvertently to another person. Carmichael's out-of-character foolishness is a transparent and clumsy plot device. It moves the plot along, but it is a rip in the narrative that I was never able to put out of mind.
There are other weaknesses in the story. People travel in airships, which is a truly hackneyed way of signaling to the reader that this is a different world. Carmichael, the head of the British Gestapo, is fearful that any stranger at his door could be an assassin, but takes a long country drive with no security in sight. These are small things, but they stand out as failures by the author to maintain the perfect pitch she sustained in the first two books.
The troubling part of the story is that it strongly suggests that Britain could have been just fine if it had made peace with Hitler. In the Farthing world, by 1960 Britain is one of three global powers (with Germany and Japan); the country is prosperous; and the empire is secure and mainly subservient. Change one crucial detail - give Britain a democracy rather than a fascist government - and Britain in the Farthing world is arguably much better off than in the real world where it fought Hitler and bankrupted itself. The author did not have to go this route with the story - that is, fascist Britain did not have to be wealthy and powerful - and it is too bad she did.
One other jarring note is the depiction of the United States. The U.S. is apparently a third-rate power, has lost wars with Japan and Britain, is coming apart at the seams, and to add insult to injury someone has nuked Miami. I don't know the author's intentions, but she has painted a picture of the United States that I suspect matches what much of the European elite thinks ought to have happened to the upstarts across the ocean.
I have a final criticism. The author never explained how James Thirkie was induced to commit suicide by gassing himself in a car. Having gone through the trouble of setting up this extraordinary situation, the author never does anything with it. Thirkie becomes even more intriguing when we learn that not only did he negotiate peace with Hitler, but his sister-in-law was married before the war to Himmler. There was a lot more that could have been done with this character, but the author did not take the opportunity.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
