Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I found this... unsettling.
I had read it a long time ago but had little memory of it except that it was an impostor plot. The wonderful prose, with its descriptions of the landscape, spot-on dialogue and lively characterizations, had me sailing through the reread with great pleasure. However, ultimately there was much I thought distasteful about it.
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Were others bothered by these issues?
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Even though this was post-war and there is a Labour party, Josephine Tey was very much a product of her class, so I give her a pass on that. Class in England was (is?) as ingrained as race in America, though perhaps not as pernicious. (People were no longer routinely hanged for being poor by this point in England, something that could not be said about Blacks in the US in the 50's.)
Another product of the class and era was Angela Thirkell, and her writing of the post-war period shows the class issues and attitudes even more glaringly. For her I don't give a pass, by the way.
The quality of the writing (and the horse writing especially, as noted by
Grey Ram) is so very good that I was completely drawn in from very early on. I had this book finished within a few days of the vote, even though I had other things on my plate. I wanted to find out how the
relationships resolved, even though I knew early on "who did it". As others have pointed out, this isn't a particularly mysterious Mystery. But the characters and venue are so well drawn that they are compelling in themselves.
Had this book been written in the 60's or later, I'd probably have been more unsettled by the moral and class issues. But even Brat knew from the beginning that this was wrong and that it couldn't continue, and we see him struggling throughout to find a way out. (Of course, preferably without giving up his new "family", of course.) The one character I can't forgive or give a pass to is Alec Loding, the instigator of this deception.
Finally, the question left completely unsettled or resolved is who Brat actually IS. That he is genetically related seems undoubted, and I kept expecting that to be a factor in the final resolution.