Library Director’s NotebookJune, 2011 If you check out the...

Tue, 05/31/2011 - 12:24pm -- KChin




Library Director’s Notebook
June, 2011

If you check out the Barrington Library webpage at www. barringtonlibrary.org,  you’ll see a regular blog feature called “The nub of the book”.  These are very brief reviews of books recommended by staff. I check the nubs out often, because I can get some wonderful ideas for “what to read next”.

One book that was recently “nubbed” is Old Filth by Jane Gardam.  Frankly, this is my kind of book!  As an unrepentant Anglophile, as far as reading tastes go, I found  this book has everything I look for: interesting if somewhat eccentric characters, British history, values, and social mores, dry humor, reminiscence, regrets leading to insight, even an unexpected plot twist about a decades old murder!

The novel centers around the life and time of  Sir Edward Feathers, also known as “Old Filth” who as a successful barrister and judge in Southeast Asia, has returned to Dorset to live out his retirement and rest on his laurels, having accrued considerable wealth during his long and illustrious career. The term “Filth” is actually an acronym for “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong” ;advice that many a lawyer or businessman found to be a successful formula during the waxing and even the waning days of the British empire.

Everyone who knows Old Filth either personally or by reputation believes he has lived an untroubled, lucky life.  Indeed, his life seems to epitomize the proper and perfect life led by a successful, unflappable British barrister, his very “rightness” leading inevitably to wealth, prestige and satisfaction.  But as the novel slowly winds its way backward and forward through the life of Edward Feathers, the reader discovers the truth about his life: the lonely ,at times abused childhood; the loss of his mother at his birth; the cold indifference of his father,  his unpredictable life as a “raj orphan”, i,e.,  a child shipped off at a tender age from the Eastern empire, back to Britain for an education and preparation for adulthood, seeing little if anything from parents  throughout the important formative years.

Known to his few lifelong friends and acquaintances as Teddy, before his steady rise to influence and power at the Bar, Old Filth hides deep psychological wounds that keep him from being able to receive or give love in more than cursory, unsatisfactory ways.   Betty, his wife of many years, seems on the surface to be a perfect, complacent mate; but the story soon reveals that Betty has her own secrets which she carefully conceals for the sake of Old Filth and their companionable, childless marriage.

Childhood abuse, resultant emotional poverty, and a lonely old age are hardly topics for levity, but this book is rescued from dreariness by a wonderful, acerbic wit and sense of irony displayed by Old Filth and many of the people he encounters.  The writing is rich in imagery and carries the reader through the last days of the British Raj with elegance and economy.    Old Filth learns a thing or two in the last days of his life about other people and about himself and benefits from that hard earned self knowledge.  As readers, we may pause and reflect along with him, and benefit as well.

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