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Half A Crown
 
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Half A Crown (Hardcover)

by Jo Walton (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
RRP: £17.50
Price: £14.22 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Half A Crown + Ha'penny + Farthing
Price For All Three: £40.95

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  • This item: Half A Crown by Jo Walton

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Tor Books (1 Sep 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0765316218
  • ISBN-13: 978-0765316219
  • Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 14 x 3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 546,703 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Half A Crown
44% buy the item featured on this page:
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0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining, but troubling, 13 Oct 2008
By Stan Mark Kaplan "Stan Kaplan" (Bethesda, MD) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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