I picked up Old Filth, by Jane Gardam, a few years ago after a friend was shocked that I hadn't read it much less heard of it. And then it sat on my TBR shelf until I pulled it out on a whim last week. I really had no preconceptions going in, so it was a complete joy to find out what a superb book this is.
Here is the GoodReads blurb by way of synopsis:
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 and emotionally hollow 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 a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep 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.
I loved the way Gardam told Eddie's story, as he remembers his childhood and grapples with the loneliness and failing health of his present. The writing is clean and elegant and deeply emotional without being overblown or hysterical, much like Eddie himself. My heart absolutely ached for the "Raj Ophans," like Eddie who were shipped back to Britain as very young children for fostering and then school while their ex-pat parents pursued their lives and careers in the far-flung corners of the empire.
My favorite part of the novel was when Eddie joins the army during WWII and is part of the guard protecting Queen Mary (the king's mother) from kidnapping while she was evacuated from London. Their intereaction made me want to learn more about this particular member of the royal family. His remembrances of this time while visiting it as an old man was absolutely compelling.
There are two more books in the series. The second, The Man in the Wooden Hat, is focused on Eddie's wife Betty, and the third, Last Friends, is the story of his nemesis, Terry Vedeering. Both sound terrific.
