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Old Filth

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Old Filth by Jane Gardam

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By Jane Gardam

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’It’s a cliche to compare novelists to Jane Austen, but in the case of Jane Gardam it happens to be true. Her diamond-like prose, her understanding of the human heart, her formal inventiveness and her sense of what it is to be alive – young, old, lonely, in love – never fades’ Amanda Craig

‘I love Jane Gardam, especially Old Filth’ Nina Stibbe

‘Her work, like Sylvia Townsend Warner’s, has that appealing combination of elegance, erudition and flinty wit’ Patrick Gale

‘One of the finest writers around. Old Filth has stayed with me for years…Can’t think of anyone who achieves so much with so few words’ Sathnam Sanghera

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 (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood.

Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the demands of his 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.

Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece that retraces much of the twentieth century’s torrid and momentous history. Feathers’ childhood in Malaya during the British Empire’s heyday, his schooling in pre-war England, his professional success in Southeast Asia and his return to England toward the end of the millennium, are vantage points from which the reader can observe the march forward of an eventful era and the steady progress of that man, Sir Edward Feathers, Old Filth himself, who embodies the century’s fate.

Reviews

23 Jan 2024

Helen G

Whitley Bay Book Group discussed Old Filth in November 2023. 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 (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now a widower in retirement, he looks back on his own history. Most of us really liked this book, although one disliked it and one was ambivalent. Those of us who...

Whitley Bay Book Group discussed Old Filth in November 2023.

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 (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now a widower in retirement, he looks back on his own history.

Most of us really liked this book, although one disliked it and one was ambivalent.

Those of us who were enthusiastic loved the language and found it very funny in parts, for example when Filth is thinking about the motorway drive, and the pen picture of the lorry driver he cut up. We liked the way the story was organised, with breadcrumbs scattered until the author let us know what happened in Wales. We thought the characters were well-drawn, and the emerging relationship between Sir Edward and Veneering, Sir Edward’s erstwhile enemy, was poignant and quite moving. We liked Albert Loss, who helped Filth at the beginning of his career, and the headmaster Sir, who could cope with anything.

Some of us weren’t aware of the Raj orphans, whose parents were running the Empire and sent them “home” to school, which could be an unhappy experience for them. Filth himself was damaged and emotionally stunted by his childhood. He ends up very successful but emotionally empty, and can be considered a metaphor for colonialism.

We were delighted to discover that Old Filth is the first book in a trilogy, with the second telling Filth’s wife Betty’s story, and the third Veneering’s. Some of us have ordered the sequels already.

We awarded the book between 1.5 and 5 stars, with an average of 4.

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