A box of delights - another masterpiece from Jane Gardam. The Man in the Wooden Hat is a companion volume to Old Filth, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.
Over her long and successful career, Jane Gardam has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize (for Old Filth in 2005) and for the Booker Prize (for God on the Rocks) and is the only writer to have been twice awarded the prize for Whitbread Novel of the Year (for The Hollow Land and Queen of the Tambourine). She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature. As well as an acclaimed novelist, she is a writer of short stories, most recently The People on Privilege Hill, whose title story was runner-up in the BBC National Short Story Award and was read on Radio 4. Jane Gardam was awarded the OBE in the 2009 New Year's Honours lists for services to literature. She was born in Yorkshire and lives in Kent.
Octogenarian Gardam's latest, told with quintessentially British humor, bookends the two-time Whitbread winner's earlier novel, Old Filth, about a barrister who becomes a renowned lawyer in the Far East whose nickname, Filth, speaks volumes: failed in London, try Hong Kong. This book concentrates on the courtship and marriage of Filth and his wife, Betty, and then flits across the years to their final days, revealing a backstory of secret trysts and desires that each concealed from the other during their long, childless marriage. Filth and Betty's early days in Hong Kong tingle with the weight of the past: Betty spent the war starving in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai; Filth talks "in his sleep in the passionate Malay of his childhood." The supporting characters in their steamy, crowded world are a bizarre lot (a card-flinging Chinese dwarf among them). Gardam's prose is witty and precise, and the hole in the middle of the story is obviously to be filled by reading (or rereading) Old Filth. (Nov.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
Edward Feathers, aka Old Filth (an acronym for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong"), Gardam's proper lawyer and judge, is back for a second outing (after Old Filth), this time as seen through the eyes of his wife, Betty. Lately returned from her wartime work at Bletchley Park and now a regular among the expat community of Hong Kong, Betty is cocooned in comfortable gentility with Filth, a loving but distant husband largely preoccupied with his legal life. After a childhood spent in a Japanese labor camp, she is now unable to have children and largely unfocused; her brief premarital fling with Filth's arch enemy, Terry Veneering, creates an enduring bond with him and his young son, Harry, who fills a void in her life. Verdict Admirers of Old Filth will be delighted to discover the backstory of his marriage and to renew acquaintances with a dear friend. Those meeting him and Mrs. Feathers for the first time will surely want more. An elegant portrait of an old-world marriage. Highly recommended.-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
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