This week Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon of Stuck in a Book are hosting another of their clubs where we all read and write about books published in the same year. This time the chosen year is 1949, which seems to have been a particularly great year for literature – last week I posted a list of my previous 1949 reviews and there were eleven of them! I have some more reviews coming this week, starting with this one, Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey, which is also on my Classics Club list.

As a baby, Brat Farrar was abandoned on the steps of an orphanage on St Bartholomew’s Day (hence the name Brat, from Bartholomew or Bart). After spending some time in America working on a ranch, he returns as an adult to England where he is spotted by Alec Loding, an actor. Loding has mistaken Brat for Simon Ashby, a young man whose family he knows well. Simon’s twin brother, Patrick, went missing eight years earlier shortly after their parent’s deaths, and was believed to have drowned himself as his coat and a suicide note were found on a clifftop. Simon is now the sole heir to Latchetts, the family estate, and is due to inherit on his twenty-first birthday, which is almost here.

Brat allows himself to be persuaded to go to Latchetts and pretend to be Patrick Ashby so that he, as the elder twin will inherit everything. Loding coaches him on the family history, the layout of the house and everything else he needs to know to be able to successfully impersonate Patrick. I’m sure if I tried to do that, I would forget it all and get caught out immediately, but Brat does an amazing job and the Ashbys are completely fooled. Or are they?

I’ve been meaning to read this book for years, ever since I read The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart, which has a very similar plot and even references Brat Farrar several times. My previous experience of Tey’s work has been mixed – I liked The Daughter of Time and found A Shilling for Candles boring – but I really enjoyed this one. I love a good impersonation story and even did a Top Ten Tuesday post on them a while ago! Tey is thought to have taken inspiration from the real life case of the Tichborne Claimant from the 1860s.

The really intriguing thing about this book is that even though we know from the start that Brat is a participant in a deliberate fraud and therefore a criminal, we find ourselves siding with him and rooting for him anyway. This is partly because Simon, the real Ashby heir, is so unlikeable, and partly because Brat, in contrast, is quiet, kind and thoughtful and his motives for going along with the impersonation scheme seem to be not so much for the money but more for the sense of belonging – and also the chance to work with the horses at Latchetts! Naturally, this leads to some internal conflict when he finds himself growing to like and care for the family he is deceiving.

This book does require some suspension of disbelief. I felt that the Ashbys and their friends and neighbours (apart from Simon, who is immediately sceptical) were very quick to accept that Patrick had returned from the dead and I found it unlikely that anyone could really carry on a deception like that for any length of time without making mistakes and giving themselves away. But apart from that – and the focus on horses, show jumping and racing, which I could have done without – this was an entertaining read and a great choice for 1949 Club!

This is also book 8/50 from my third Classics Club list.