The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing by Mary Paulson-Ellis

The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing by Mary Paulson-Ellis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In the dying days of the first world war a squad of British soldiers with orders to undertake a highly dangerous river-crossing wile away the days before the attack by gambling. A greenhorn lieutenant eager for his first taste of action sows dissent among the men. One of them is killed, his legacy a pawnbroker's ticket. The soldiers are all representative types: the 'old sweat', the gay couple, the captain weighed down by his responsibilities, the coward, the wide boy,

In modern-day Edinburgh, Solomon, grandson of the officer in charge of the squad, tries to find the heir to an old man who has died in a nursing home, his clue being a pawnbroker's ticket. His search takes him to a foundling home in Northumbria.

The story shuttles between these two narratives; there are also snippets telling what happened to some of the soldiers after the war.

I found the first world war storyline a very slow build. One knew at once that someone (maybe more than one) had died because that is given ion the very first page. This hook was necessary because the soldiers did nothing for a long time except gambling and worrying and squabbling. This was tremendously authentic and the interplay between the characters was fascinating, but it was slow.

The modern storyline was significantly more surreal, though narrated with everyday and sometimes gritty reality. A trio of women sitting around a coffin appear at the start and the end. Solomon, in debt to a loan shark, escapes prison because a police officer wants him to do him a favour. On his journey south to find the heir he seems to have a charmed existence, turning up evidence wherever he goes and never questioning the most obscure clues. Characters from the first-world-war story keep cropping up in their descendants and coincidences abound, including resonances into his own murky past. Companions (a dog and a schoolboy) join him for portions of his quest. And I think the word quest explains what is happening. This storyline has a mythic quality. It is as if when Solomon leaves Edinburgh he enters a world which, for all its everydayness, is not quite real. It seems like a 'hero's jounrey' sort of story.

So back to the WWI storyline: is that also mythic? The farmhouse they find themselves at, in the last days of the war, with peace just around the corner and annihilation available just over the river, is more than once referred to as Eden and at least one of them acts as an Iago-like serpent. And, of course, they are all, in the present-day of the Solomon narrative, already dead.

So it seemed to me that the book was not just a simple whodunnit-style Heir Hunting story but one which offered totally unexpected resonances.

Some memorable moments:
"Some men were born to give instruction and others to take it. That's just the way it is." (The Debt, 1918, 2)
"Heir Hunting was full of false trails, but Solomon knew from experience that there was never a dead end on a family tree, only another branch to explore." (The Pawn, 2016, 2)
"Edinburgh, a city in which one often reached the destination one wanted, without ever quite understanding the route." (The Bet, 2016, 3)
"What was it about a society that called them heroes ... when all it ever did was use boys as fodder for the guns." (The Charge, 2016, 1)



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