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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