Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION GAR | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Second in the Old Filth trilogy. "An astute, subtle depiction of marriage . . . absolutely wonderful" ( The Washington Post ).
Acclaimed as Jane Gardam's masterpiece, Old Filth is a lyrical novel that recalls the fully lived life of Sir Edward Feathers. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself.
They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s.
As a portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the fifty-year union of two remarkable people, The Man in the Wooden Hat is a triumph. Fiction of a very high order from a great novelist working at the pinnacle of her considerable power, it will be read and loved and recommended by all the many thousands of readers who found its predecessor, Old Filth , so compelling and thoroughly satisfying.
"Funny and affecting . . . It's remarkable."-- The New York Times Book Review
"The latest occasion to celebrate Gardam . . . [a] superb novel."--Maureen Corrigan, NPR
"Told with quintessentially British humor . . . Gardam's prose is witty and precise."-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"It's magnificent. . . . Funny, intelligent and immensely moving."-- Kirkus Reviews
Author Notes
Jane Gardam was born in North Yorkshire, England in 1928. She is the author of many children's novels that include "A Long Way from Verona" (1971). She has also written novels and collections of stories for adults that include "God on the Rocks" (1978), "Bilgewater and the Pangs of Love and Other Stories" (1983) and "The Summer After the Funeral." Her book "Groundlings" was taken from "Showing the Flag and Other Stories" (1989). Gardam's novels and stories have received many literary prizes.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Readers who enjoyed Gardam's Old Filth (2006) will welcome her new novel. A companion and an amplification rather than a sequel, it tells much of the same story, but from a different angle. Whereas jurist Sir Edward Feathers (aka Filth, for Failed in London, Try Hong Kong ) was at the heart of the earlier work, here his wife, Betty, takes center stage, and we learn much more about their courtship and wedding in Hong Kong and their 50-year marriage. At the novel's end, we revisit Filth in old age, retired in Dorset and a widower wrestling with his past. Although the new book offers many rewards with its combination of sharp humor and deep humanity, readers who come upon it without having read Old Filth may be mystified at times. Albert Ross, for example, the dwarf who played such a pivotal role in Filth's life in the previous book, might seem an inexplicable presence here. Be sure to recommend the two books in tandem.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LIKE the great British wits her writing recalls, Jane Gardam has a talent for picking names. "The Man in the Wooden Hat" features the fastidious Sir Edward Feathers, an expatriate judge known as Filth (for "failed in London, try Hong Kong"); a striver called Terry Veneering (whose last name is borrowed from Dickens); a Chinese dwarf, Albert Ross, known suggestively as Albatross; and Betty Feathers, née Elisabeth Macintosh. To those who know her later in life, she's as sturdy and dependable as a raincoat, the perfect judge's wife. But Macintosh turns out to be as deceptive a descriptor of Betty as Filth is of the spotless Feathers. Underneath that impervious surface is a woman cut from unusual cloth. Born in Tientsin (now Tianjin), China, Betty was raised on the periphery of the British Empire. Unlike her parents, she survived the World War II internment camps in Shanghai; later, she thrived at boarding school and Oxford. As the book opens, she's back in Hong Kong when a letter from a young hotshot barrister, Edward Feathers, arrives, asking for her hand in marriage. The letter, on writing paper from his legal chambers, could almost pass for an official document. Edward is what was once called a "Raj orphan," born in a colonial outpost and raised by his schools - and by sometimes-nasty strangers. (His story is brilliantly and hilariously told in Gardam's previous novel "Old Filth.") Betty, who misses her parents acutely, wants nothing more than to have children; Edward's consuming preoccupation is a fear of abandonment. "Never leave me," he commands her, more than once. Of course, when he says this, he's usually leaving her himself, rushing off to work on yet another case. At a party immediately after she accepts Edward's proposal, Betty meets his professional nemesis, Veneering, who is loud and louche - and married. There is an instant and electric connection between them. "Just one hour too late," Betty thinks to herself. When she finds Veneering's unruly 9-year-old son, Harry, sitting underneath a table munching on a lobster, she's completely unmoored by this combination of troublesome, charming child and troublesome, charming father. At times during their long marriage, Betty regards her promise to Edward as a curse. "Never leave me" is more or less what "marry me" means (in theory, at least), but in this case the words have the edge of a threat. "If you leave him, I will break you," Edward's best friend, Albert, tells her. Whenever she weakens, he materializes to remind her of her obligations. BUT if Betty is bound by fear and guilt, she's also bound by love. In Gardam's hands, marriage can be the stuff of comedy, especially farce. One minute Betty is despairing, still feeling trapped in her marriage, and the next she's pressing her face against her husband's shirt, thinking how much she loves him. Over the course of their 50 years together, the complexity of their relationship only intensifies. They keep some secrets and confess others; they act generously but also with passive aggression, sometimes in the span of a single moment. British expatriates living in Hong Kong, they are the elite of an empire that will soon cease to exist. If they have only each other - and hardly even that - it will have to do. Against the odds, they persevere. One of the few feats that's harder than doing justice to a complicated marriage is doing justice to it twice. "The Man in the Wooden Hat" revisits territory covered in "Old Filth," but as Betty's story instead of Edward's. It's not necessary to have read the prior book to enjoy this one. If anything, "The Man in the Wooden Hat" makes the fractured plot and chronology of "Old Filth" easier to understand. Still, it's worth reading (or rereading) "Old Filth." On its own, "The Man in the Wooden Hat" is funny and affecting, but read alongside "Old Filth," it's remarkable. Gardam has attempted to turn a story inside out without damaging the original narrative's integrity - moving from black to white without getting stuck with gray. Little here is as it seemed in "Old Filth," and both books are the richer for it. In "The Man in the Wooden Hat," when Sir Edward and his wife are old, and she thinks, yet again, about leaving, she spots him watching the rooks in the garden as she plants tulip bulbs. He picks up his walking stick and "like a child, pointed it up at the rookery and shouted, 'Bang, bang, bang.' . . . He's quite potty, she thought. It's too late. I can't leave him now." She's resigned, but also tender. What divided them, after all, was never Terry Veneering. It was his son, Harry. Betty had known her marriage would lack passion, but she believed children would be her consolation. At the end of her life, though, she looks at Filth and knows that someone "like a child," if not actually one, has depended on her all along. In "Old Filth," a parallel scene is mostly the same, but the sentiment is different. There, Edward has a large gin in hand instead of a walking stick. She looks at him angrily. "I won't get any nearer to him now, she thought. . . . Too late now." It's too late to leave him; it's too late to love him. In a long marriage, both can be true. Louisa Thomas is a contributing editor for Newsweek.
Library Journal Review
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. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
