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Summary
Summary
First in the Old Filth trilogy. A New York Times Notable Book. "Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters" ( The New York Times Book Review ).
Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away.
Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written an unforgettable novel reminiscent of Evan S. Connell's books Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, and Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep. Retracing much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history, Old Filth is the first installment of an immersive and atmospheric trilogy that, taken together, tells the moving story of a long, complicated marriage.
" Old Filth is an extraordinary novel--the structure, the characters, the sweep of time."--Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
"I don't know why Gardam isn't universally celebrated and beloved. Her prose is dazzling, and she writes with a kind of subdued but wicked humor that takes a moment to clamp down on you."--Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
"I think Jane Gardam is a genius and should be far more widely read. She has actually made me gasp, slap a book shut and say, 'She can't do that!,' open it up and realize that she can, she has, and it works."--Denise Mina, author of Conviction
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
The New York Times Book Review
The Washington Post
The San Francisco Chronicle
New York Magazine
The Globe & Mail
Slate
"Will bring immense pleasure to readers who treasure fiction that is intelligent, witty, sophisticated and--a quality encountered all too rarely in contemporary culture--adult."-- The Washington Post
"Gardam is an exquisite storyteller, picking up threads, laying them down, returning to them and giving them new meaning . . . Old Filth is sad, funny, beautiful and haunting."-- The Seattle Times
"A masterpiece of storytelling."-- The Dallas Morning News
"[Jane Gardam is] the best contemporary British writer you probably haven't heard of."--Maureen Corrigan, NPR
Author Notes
Jane Gardam was born in North Yorkshire, England in 1928. She is the author of many children's novels that include "A Long Way from Verona" (1971). She has also written novels and collections of stories for adults that include "God on the Rocks" (1978), "Bilgewater and the Pangs of Love and Other Stories" (1983) and "The Summer After the Funeral." Her book "Groundlings" was taken from "Showing the Flag and Other Stories" (1989). Gardam's novels and stories have received many literary prizes.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
British novelist Gardam has twice won the Whitbread and was shortlisted for the Man Booker. This, her 15th novel, was shortlisted in Britain for the Orange Prize; it outlines 20th-century British history through the life of Sir Edward Feathers, a barrister whose acronymic nickname provides the title: "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong." At nearly 80, Feathers, retired in Dorset after many years as a respected Hong Kong judge, is a hollow man with few real friends and a cold, sexless marriage that has just ended with the death of his wife, Betty. For the first time, "Filth" (as even Betty called him) delves into the past that produced him: a "Raj orphan" raised by a series of surrogates while his father worked in Singapore, Filth served briefly in WWII (guarding the Queen) and had a lackluster stint as a London barrister before emigrating. The flashbacks contrast British privilege and the chaos that ensues when the empire (especially Filth's childhood Malaya), starts to crumble. As Filth undertakes chaotic visits to his Welsh foster home and other sites, Gardam's sharp, acerbic style counterpoints Feathers's dryness. Well-rounded secondary figures further highlight his emptiness and that of empire. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The marvelously versatile Gardam (Faith Fox, 2003, etc.) dips into British imperial history for her extraordinary portrait of a Raj orphan. Filth is an acronym (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) and the affectionate nickname for Sir Edward Feathers, whose distinguished career, as an advocate and judge, began in Hong Kong in 1947. His colleagues saw an "untroubled and uneventful life." Boy, were they wrong. For Eddie, son of a servant of Empire, was a Raj orphan whose common lot was to be shipped off to British foster families. Eddie's case was extreme. His mother died after giving birth in Malaya; his whisky-fueled father rejected him; he was housed with a native girl, Ada, who adored him. Eddie's first trauma will be his removal from Ada; the four-year-old is dispatched (in steerage) to a child-hating, sadistic foster mother in Wales, Ma Didds. His time with her will be his second great trauma. The story begins when Filth is an old man, living alone in the English countryside, his beloved wife Betty recently dead, then alternates fluidly between old age and childhood and youth, which had its bright spots. Filth has repressed memories of Ma Didds's regime, which he ended dramatically with the help of her other charges, his cousins Babs and Claire. Yet the horrifying memory tolls like a distant bell, and the climax comes when Filth and Babs relive it, in the presence of a priest. The wheel has come full circle; the old man is as vulnerable as a child; his spiritual journey is complete. Gardam's richly textured novel is packed with memorable sequences: Eddie traveling to Singapore, an evacuee from WW2 Britain, sharing a cabin with a half-Chinese cardsharp; back in Britain, guarding Queen Mary from the Germans; much later, in shock after Betty's death, driving wildly across England to visit ancient, half-mad cousin Babs, who has just proposed to a schoolboy. One of the finest achievements of this greatly talented British author. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Anglophile readers wondering who their next favorite British writer will be need look no further than Gardam, who, despite having won numerous literary awards and been short-listed for the Booker Prize, is not nearly as well known in the U.S. as she deserves. The title of this, her twelfth novel, seems to promise that satiric bite British authors do so well, but although there's plenty of sharp humor here, the book has many other moods. Sir Edward Feathers--called Filth (even by his wife, Betty) for Failed in London Try Hong Kong --is now retired and living in Dorset after a distinguished career as a barrister in the Far East. Betty's sudden death sends him on both a real and an imagined journey to rediscover his past as a Raj orphan born in Malaya but shipped back home early and brought to manhood at the hands of a variety of surrogate parents and guides, some good, some bad. For everything else Gardam's richly layered story and acute observation provide, this is finally a portrait of old age, offered with unflinching realism but also deep compassion. --Mary Ellen Quinn Copyright 2006 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Gardam's impressive oeuvre runs to over 25 books for adults and children, including Whitbread Prize winners The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land, but her latest has the freshness and energy of a particularly brilliant first novel. Filth (short for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong") is a retired international lawyer who has recently been widowed. Left to contemplate his long marriage, the moral contradictions of his career, and the passionate hatred he harbors for his next-door neighbor, Filth keeps returning to the trauma of his childhood as a "Raj orphan," one of the countless colonial children sent away from their parents to be educated in a "home" in an England they had never known. The various meanings of "home" and the gap between the public persona and the private person are just two of the complex themes that Gardam treats here with the lightest of touches. Both witty and poignant, this work is more than a character study; through her protagonist, Gardam offers a view of the last days of empire as seen from post-9/11 Britain. Strongly recommended.-Leora Bersohn, Columbia Univ., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.