Old Filth | Jane Gardam | Return to Youth

Old Filth | Jane Gardam | "All my life I have been left or dumped...I want to know why."

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Old Filth

	Old Filth Jane Gardam Europa Editions, 2006 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Return to Youth

A wonderful novel! However, I should say right away that my enthusiasm for the book is probably enhanced by its personal resonances; more about that in a moment.

Only the title is awkward. "Filth" stands for "Failed in London, try Hong Kong," which is a misleading soubriquet for the central character, Sir Edward Feathers, a distinguished advocate and judge, and a man of the utmost probity. Born in the Far East, he was educated in England, spent most of his brilliant professional career in Hong Kong, and has now as returned to England in retirement. He is shown as a lonely old man, unable to make close personal connections, even with his wife of over fifty years. One of the book's many beauties is the way in which Feathers reaches out in old age to repair at least a few of these missed connections.

The book takes the central portion of Sir Edward's career mainly for granted, concentrating instead upon the way memories of his first quarter-century come back to haunt him as he enters his last. Born in Malaya of a mother who died in childbirth and a half-mad father who never spoke to him, he was shipped off to Britain as a young child, spending his formative years with an abusive foster-mother in Wales, and then at various boarding schools. The book describes his dysfunctional relationship with various distant relatives and close friendships with a family who are not relatives at all, his sexual education, and his wartime service guarding the Queen Mother -- all experiences that turn out to have shaped his life. The warmest contacts seem to be the most transient, and he almost entirely lacks the strong family structure that would have given him stability. As the story progresses, dodging backwards and forwards in time, the reader begins to understand how the man could have become so aloof and afraid of emotion. More importantly, Feathers begins to understand a little in himself also.

Gardam uses a term that I had not heard before, "Raj Orphan." It refers to the children of British colonial administrators sent Home in early childhood, often not seeing their parents again for many years. My father had such a childhood, and I believe was seared by it; his two brothers, like Sir Edward Feathers, both went into the law; and all of us, including myself, underwent a similarly spartan education. At times, I felt I was reading a family biography!

But I think it would work for other readers also, especially if they have an interest in a vanished past or of an age when it is more fascinating to look back than to peer forward. I am not convinced that it all quite hangs together as a unified narrative; there is an encounter with two distant cousins of the next generation that seems a little out of place, and I find myself wanting to know more about Old Filth's adult years than I do, but that would have made a much longer book. Gardam's style is lucid and sometimes luminous, her comparison of lives and attitudes over a sixty-year span rings entirely true, and -- even though writing about a man who cannot easily feel emotion -- her own power to evoke feeling is quite remarkable.

I also want to say that the Europa paperback edition is a real joy: flexible yet solid, with distinguished typesetting on quality paper with lots of space.

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"All my life I have been left or dumped...I want to know why."

Sir Edward Feathers, known as "Old Filth," is, ironically, "spectacularly...ostentatiously clean." His nickname derives from the fact that as a lawyer, he "Failed In London, Tried Hongkong." A "Raj Orphan," Filth is a child of British civil servants of the Empire in Malaya. Like other Raj children, he is sent back to England, alone, at the age of five , to begin school in a country he's never seen among people he does not know. For Filth, the alienation is tripled--his mother died when he was born; his father, suffering from shellshock and alcoholism, always ignored him; and, living in the Malayan longhouse with the servants, he saw himself as Malay, more comfortable with that language and culture than "his own."

Gardam writes a powerful character study of this intriguing character whose fate it was "always to be left and forgotten." Now in his early eighties and living in Dorset, his wife dead, he reminisces about the past and hints at some terrible event that took place when he was eight, living in Wales with Ma Dibbs, who took care of him and two young cousins.

The narrative moves gracefully between present and past, following the life of Filth as he attends school in England, becomes part of his best friend's family, gets caught between cultures when World War II breaks out, begins his London law career, and, eventually, "tries Hongkong." Now, at the end of his life, he is in Dorset, aware that he has never really known love and has never had a home, and equally aware that he must now reach out, deal with his memories, and take control of his life if he is ever to find peace.

Gardam's supplementary characters appear and reappear throughout Filth's reminiscences--his wife Betty, more a friend than a lover; his best friend Pat Ingoldby, whose family "adopted" him; his two cousins, who survived Ma Dibbs with him; his golf-obsessed aunts who ignore him; and Veneering, a man he and Betty knew in Malaya, who becomes his neighbor in Dorset. Gradually, Filth reveals his secrets and his fears, while maintaining his elegant outward reserve, and the reader empathizes with this man, a product of his culture forced to fend for himself from the age of five.

Subtle and elegantly written, this novel, shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005, is also compulsively readable with its poignant scenes and ironic humor. Filth, for all his class-consciousness, is likeable and often earnest, and he engages the reader's emotions from the outset. His late-in-life questions about whether his life has had meaning resonate with the reader. n Mary Whipple

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A real treat

Don't be put off by the horrid title or by the fact that the main character, whose real name is Sir Edward Feathers, is frequently referred to as Filth, even by his loving wife: the nickname of this distinguished lawyer who had made his career in the Far East, stood for Failed In London Try Hong Kong. Otherwise no name could be less appropriate for this old man who is described as "spectacularly clean" and whose kaleidoscopic life story, in England and the Far East, this is. It would be a spoiler if I described it or the gaps in the story which the author leaves to our imagination to fill in.

The book and the characters in it are quirky, funny, sad, and touching; the touches of period flavour (ca. 1923 to 2002 - though there seems to be an error on the very last page) are spot-on; and Jane Gardam' style is idiosyncratic, often staccato, but a pleasure to read. Her similes or descriptions are never hackneyed, never forced, but always fresh and arresting. I found the novel a real treat.

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A wonderfully entertaining account of his life and times as a part of England's sometimes eccentric legal system

Jane Gordam's novel Old Filth is the remarkable tale of Sir Edward "Filth" Feathers and a wonderfully entertaining account of his life and times as a part of England's sometimes eccentric legal system. Deftly carrying readers through Filth's exploration of life from his struggles as a young Barrister to his ultimate retirement from a judgeship in the beautiful Dorset, Old Filth is very strongly recommended as a giftedly authored novel portraying of one man's life and times. Destined to be a minor classic of the literary arts, Old Filth continues to clearly establish why Jane Gordam is considered to be an award-winning author of note. Also highly recommended are her early works: "Black Faces, White Faces" (1975); "God on the Rocks" (1978)"The Pangs of Love and Other Stories (1983); "The Queen of the Tambourine" (1991); "Going into a Dark House" (1994), and "The Flight of the Maidens" (2000).

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Old Filth

This book sent me on a quest for more of Jane Gardam. Old Filth is charming - if you love sound writing this book will transport you where few books take one nowadays. NYT Book Review calls it "splendid" and that does not over-reach.

reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4

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