It suffers from comparison with du Maurier’s The Scapegoat, which is better in many ways but particularly the feeling that everything could crumble at any point. It’s very interesting to read about, but there isn’t much tension. Anyway, they’re all pleased to see him and immediately taken in – except for the twin, Simon, who is rather stand-offish and the last to be convinced that Brat is Patrick. I suppose one can’t spend half the book with people fainting from surprise, but still. Patrick’s aunt and guardian, Bea, is a delightful character – wise, kind, very mildly dry – and I loved her, but she is representative of the whole family in her fairly lukewarm response. They react in the way I might if I saw someone I hadn’t expect to see for another month or two. It’s the less vital parts of the puzzle that left me slightly more incredulous – for instance, Patrick’s family don’t seem that bothered about his return from the dead. It’s an intriguing set up, if one is willing to suspend disbelief, and I always am for some sort of coincidental premise. Man, he loves horses almost as much as Josephine Tey thinks the reader loves horses.
Brat is an orphan (his name is a corruption of St Bartholomew’s Orphanage) and has made his way in the world through being on a ranch in America.
Speaking as an older twin by a few minutes… I wish.īrat is a nice man, and isn’t particularly swayed by the idea of an inheritance – what really gets him is the idea that he’ll get to work with a whole stableful of premium horses. So Brat is persuaded to go back and pretend to be the missing Patrick – and, as the older twin by a few minutes, inherit the family wealth. A suicide note was found, but his body has never been identified – one washed up that was assumed to be him, but it was beyond recognition. As it happens, Simon’s twin brother went missing when he was 13, seven years earlier.
What a bad title! I wonder why she did it? Anyway, he meets a man who tells him he is a doppelganger for a neighbour called Simon Ashby. (In most years, The Scapegoat would have been among my best reads – but 2020 had some truly brilliant reads.)īrat Farrar is the lead character of the novel – yes, it is a name, and an almost wilfully terrible one. It definitely came up during our discussion of Daphne du Maurier’s brilliant novel The Scapegoat, because the premise is very similar. It was she who gave me a copy of Brat Farrar (1949) last year, as part of a lovely package to cheer during lockdown, and I suspect it was me who got my book group to read it. My old housemate, and dear friend, Kirsty has three abiding passions: dogs, lexicography, and talking about how great Josephine Tey is.
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