Jane Gardam, the contemporary British novelist now in her 96th year, is quite highly regarded in her home country (she is OBE after all) but is little known outside the United Kingdom, and is virtually unknown in the U.S. Yet she is the winner of several awards and has been a prolific author of both children’s and adult fiction: Her book The Hollow Land (1981) won Britain’s prestigious Whitbread Children’s Book Award, and her adult novel The Queen of the Tambourine won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1991. Another of her novels, God on the Rocks, was nominated for the even more coveted Booker Prize in 1978. But her more recent novels have been perhaps even more appreciated by the reading public, at least in the U.K., particularly her 2004 novel Old Filth. In a 2015 BBC-sponsored survey of literary critics from outside the U.K. that listed the “100 Greatest British Novels of All Time,” Old Filth was ranked as number 71. And it appears here as book number 38 on my own list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
This is the tragic/comic story of Sir Edward Feathers, a judge of the Inner Temple, retired to Dorset and recently widowed. In the course of the novel, Feathers looks back over his life, from his origins in British controlled Malaya to his fostering as a “Raj orphan” in Wales, through his distinguished legal career to his later years in retirement. The novel opens with a scene in a lunch room in London’s Inner Temple, where an elderly gentleman dining alone has just left. The man had seemed familiar to a number of the jurist diners, who wonder who he was, until the Common Sergeant reveals: “It was Old Filth. Great advocate, judge and — bit of a wit. Said to have invented FILTH — Failed in London Try Hong Kong. He tried Hong Kong.”
In one short page of dialogue, our curiosity about the book’s title is satisfied, and at the same time our curiosity about the man who had occupied that empty chair in the lunch room is kindled, and we read on to learn more about the old fellow. Now eighty years old and living a retired life alone in Dorset—his wife Betty has died of a heart attack while gardening—Edward AKA “Old Filth” has a good deal of time to muse over his life, and we learn quickly that his life, which seems to outside observers to have been an “untroubled and uneventful” one, has been anything but.
Through Edward’s recollections, we learn he had been born in Malaysia, where his mother died three days after giving birth to him. His father was a colonial British minister who showed him little affection and left him to be raised by his wet nurse. After a few years his father is persuaded to send Edward back to England for his education–to become what was called a “Raj orphan.” Edward is torn from his nurse (with whom he felt loved) and sent, along with two female cousins, to be raised by Welsh foster parents, Ma and Pa Didds, who are anything but loving. Indeed, something terrible happened to the child Edward in that place, something that Gardam keeps from the reader until the novel’s end, but which hovers in Edward’s consciousness throughout the book.
The grimness of his early years is balanced somewhat by the rather comic scenes that succeed them, for example his adolescent evacuation from England to Singapore early in the second World War, where he shares his cabin with a half-Chinese card shark, and, perhaps most memorably, his military service later in the war. He is assigned to the detail of Queen Mary, mother of George VI, when she is evacuated from wartime London to the home of her long-suffering niece, the Duchess of Beaufort, along with her household of 55 servants. The Queen Mother makes young Edward her personal favorite (apparently because he has a stammer like the king himself), while the Duchess channels all her appeals and complaints through him.
Feathers finally begins his legal career in, yes, Hong Kong, in 1947. The history of his professional career in not nearly so compete or vivid as his early years or his years of retirement. In the book’s present, the 80-year-old retired judge tries to come to grips with his suddenly single life after his wife’s death in the garden of their Dorset home. Looking back at his life with Betty, he characterizes her as a woman who “was very faithful.” Yet in the days following her death, he receives two separate letters that commend him for his exemplary behavior in the way he handled his wife’s affair with the British lawyer Terry Veneering in Hong Kong. Edward, it seems clear, was an emotionally distant husband—how could he be otherwise given the experience of his early years?—and Veneering must have given Betty the tenderness she needed. As if to add insult to injury, this very Veneering takes a house right next to Edward’s own later in the novel.
Haunted by his past, particularly the experiences under Ma and Pa Didds’ fosterage, Feathers sets out on a spur-of-the-moment quest to find his old cousin Babs, now perhaps senile and carrying on a romance with a schoolboy. Here, in the belief that he may himself be dying, he confronts the truth of his past, confessing to a priest. I’ll certainly not reveal what this part of the book relates. Suffice it to say that Old Filth is not simply the acronym that Edward has given himself. There is a good deal of old filth that he’s buried in his life, that now needs to be swept away.
I seem to have made the novel more deadly serious than it is. Indeed, Feathers’ journey is more comic than tragic, and there is a good deal of fun in his exploits, and irony as well, especially in his dealings with his new neighbor, Veneering. Veneering, by the way, is the name of a character in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, and there is something quite Dickensian in Gardam’s characters, particularly Feathers himself. He could easily be presented as a great fool, a pitiable cuckold, a bureaucratic drudge who served as simply a cog in the great wheel of empire that ultimately grinds to a halt as the empire slips from Britain’s fingers. But he is more than the sum of those parts, as his inner life makes clear by the end of the novel.As the sum of those parts, though, Feathers can also be seen as embodying the 20th century in his own lifetime. His early life traces a history not uncommon among British children of a certain class, “Raj orphans,” shuffled from colony to England to back again, so that whole generations of British children grew up virtually rootless.
Gardam acknowledges in the book her debt to accounts of Rudyard Kipling’s early life. Perhaps the fact that this very British phenomenon does not resonate so readily with American readers explains why Gardam is virtually unknown or uncelebrated in this country. But the wide scope of experience that the life of Sir Edward Feathers encompasses, the psychological depth of this apparently uncomplicated legal functionary, and the mysterious secrets that are kept from us until the novel’s denouement, make this novel highly entertaining as well as enlightening. I highly recommend that you give this novel a read. There’s a good chance you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.