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Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"The satisfying conclusion to Gardam's Old Filth trilogy offers exquisite prose, wry humor, and keen insights into aging and death" ( The New Yorker ).
While Old Filth introduced readers to Sir Edward Feathers, his dreadful childhood, and his decades-long marriage, The Man in the Wooden Hat was his wife Betty's story. Last Friends is Terence Veneering's turn. His beginnings were not those of the usual establishment grandee. Filth's hated rival in court and in love is the son of a Russian acrobat marooned in the English midlands and a local girl. He escapes the war and later emerges in the Far East as a man of panache and fame. The Bar treats his success with suspicion: where did this handsome, brilliant Slav come from? This exquisite story of Veneering, Filth, and their circle tells a bittersweet tale of friendship and grace and of the disappointments and consolations of age. They are all, finally, each other's last friend as this magnificent series ends with the deep and abiding satisfaction that only great literature provides.
"[Gardam's] prose sparkles with wit, compassion and humor. She keeps us entertained, and she keeps us guessing. Be thankful for her books. Be thankful for this trilogy, which is ultimately an elegy, created with deep affection."-- The Washington Post
"Restores us to an era rich in spectacle and bristling with insinuation and intrigue. Vivid, spacious, superbly witty, and refreshingly brisk . . . the story (and the author) will endure."-- The Boston Globe
"All three Gardam books are beautifully written but it's a pleasure to note that Last Friends is the most enjoyable, the funniest and the most touching."-- National Post
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 (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Completing the trilogy begun by Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat, Gardam's impeccable finale revisits the triad of Edward "Old Filth" Feathers; his wife, Betty; and his rival (and Betty's lover), Terry Veneering. Although this third installation is ostensibly about Veneering, it is just as much about the minor characters these three have left in their wake. The novel begins at Old Filth's memorial service as Dulcie, widow of Judge William Willy, and Fred Fiscal-Smith, the perpetual hanger-on, share hazy reminiscences of their departed friends. As the two witness the last traces of the British Empire fade away, Gardam juxtaposes scenes from Veneering's impoverished childhood, describing the pains he took in order to escape class restrictions and become a respected lawyer. Though familiarity with the prior two installments of the trilogy is not necessary, readers entering the story at this late entry will miss much of the richness and depth of Gardam's narrative. They see themselves moving out of sync with the world around them, as one of the numerous geriatrics who populate this novel muses "Perhaps fiction was a mistake, it has rather fizzled out." But here Gardam proves that, even in its twilight, there is still life in the traditional English novel. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
In her novels Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat, Jane Gardam has already written about the entangled lives of three people: Edward Feathers, a QC specialising in construction law in Hong Kong and then a judge, Feathers' wife Betty, and Terry Veneering, Feathers' career rival and Betty's lover for one night before her marriage. Old Filth was centred on Feathers and The Man in the Wooden Hat on Betty. Now Last Friends adds Veneering's story to the mix. Usually a trilogy moves forward through time, each book taking up more or less where the previous one left off; Gardam does something stranger. Each of her three books retells the story from a vantage point in the character's old age. Hidden elements come to light in each novel, and each is inflected differently by the protagonists' different characters. For a significant portion of all the novels at least one or two and sometimes all of the protagonists are dead, which makes these fictions perhaps Last Friends most of all feel uncannily, giddily as if they are poised on a threshold, as if all the matter in these packed, complicated lives, thick with history, is about to fall over an edge into oblivion (from which only the novel-record saves it). This late, late perspective doesn't mean the writing is gloomy on the contrary, it's exuberant and funny and dizzy and a little bit frightening. "The smell of deep-blue hyacinths in bowls set heads spinning and the polished blackness of the windows before the curtains were drawn across showed that the wet and starless world had passed into infinite space. Dulcie thought again about the last scene of the last act." Dulcie is the widow of Pastry Willy, another judge; she's a friend of the Featherses and Veneering and survives them all. Dulcie is not senile, exactly, but she's sometimes confused, and her confusion is part of the way we see things in Late Friends. "So much going on ... that she seemed to be seeing for the first time, or analysing for the first time, though she knew it was everyday, as habitual as looking at a clock or holding out a hand. Yet whatever did it mean?" The novel closes with Dulcie making her way into church on Easter Sunday: the last word on the last page is "Resurrection". And the writing everywhere is rich with light effects. Lights blaze from a house supposed to be empty; in Malta a freshwater stream falls through a crack in a clifftop, a "spout of spittle shining like light above the ocean"; the view from Veneering's house is "a shimmering water-colour dream". The story shifts from past to present, and from England to elsewhere, like pieces shaken up in a kaleidoscope; scenes and characters loom vividly and then flash past. The one thing old age doesn't feel like in Gardam's world is repose, or a conclusion, or an arrival anywhere even though retirement in rural Dorset, which all these characters choose, ought to feel like the embodiment of an English Home (the word has a capital letter for these children of the end of the Empire). But where's Home? Betty dies in her garden, but Veneering dies in Malta after punching someone who's insulted Betty's memory, and Feathers dies stepping off the plane in "what he still called The Malay States". As a baby he was wrapped in the arms of a childish ayah beside the Black River in the jungles of Malaysia, "watched over by different gods". And Veneering, it turns out in Late Friends, was from somewhere as remote from wealthy rural Dorset as Malaysia ever was. The story of Veneering's childhood in Teesside is the strong centre of this third part of the trilogy. He's the child of Florrie Benson, who heaves coal for a living ("she adored her work"), and a mysterious Russian acrobat and dancer who may be also a spy; Florrie nurses the Russian after she sees him fall in the circus and break his back. Black with coal dust, wearing a man's coat tied with a rope around her middle, Florrie is perhaps the most romantic character in the trilogy, passionate in her devotion to her husband and son. And Veneering is so convincingly, solidly imagined, from the lanky, athletic, solitary child with white-blond hair, "in full gear from the start", to the handsome, quixotic old man still in love with Betty Feathers after she's dead. (Whereas Feathers thinks, with relief, that Betty "was not necessary to him any more".) Veneering makes himself over into a part of the establishment without ever exactly disavowing his working-class origins (mostly, with more buttoned-up manners, nobody asks). The social mobility of the postwar era is part of the subject of Gardam's trilogy, an ambitious and complex portrait of extraordinary times. Tessa Hadley's latest book is Clever Girl (Jonathan Cape).
Kirkus Review
Award-winning British author Gardam completes her superb Old Filth trilogy--Old Filth (2004) and The Man in the Wooden Hat (2009)--with Sir Terence Veneering's story. This third--and final--book about a love triangle involving two bitter rivals is exquisitely expressive. When Sir Terence and Sir Edward die within months of each other, only a few people at their memorial services can personally recall the details of the venerable yet tumultuous lives they led. But old Dulcie, widow of judge William Willy, and Sir Frederick Fiscal-Smith, perennial houseguest of the upper class, share fleeting recollections of earlier lives through reminisces that are clouded with the haze of old age. The author's two previous books focused on the stories of Sir Edward "Old Filth" Feathers and his wife, Betty. Gardam completes the trilogy by telling bits and pieces of Sir Terry Veneering's rise from an impoverished childhood to a life of distinction. Terry, born the son of Florrie, a coal vendor, and Russian-born Anton, a former acrobat and dancer whose career is cut short when he suffers an injury, is an intelligent youngster with an affinity for languages and a love of the sea. While roaming the beach one day, he meets a lawyer who helps him further his education. A fortuitous last-minute decision and some devastating news sends Terry to Ampleforth College and subsequently to sharing top honors on the bar exam finals with Sir Edward. Their rivalry, fired when they represent opposing sides in court and fueled by Sir Terry's love of Betty, endures until the twilight of their lives. Those who've read the first two books in the series will no doubt relish the opportunity to gain insight into the life of the third key player in the love story, but they'll also feel deeply moved by Dulcie and Fiscal-Smith, two relics of the old guard who recall a time in England when one's class restrictions were difficult to circumvent and surnames were of ultimate importance--regardless of accomplishments or financial circumstances. Impeccably written.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Last Friends brings to a close Jane Gardam's lauded series that includes Old Filth (2006) and The Man in the Wooden Hat (2011). Like its predecessors, this final installment examines the complex world of British class, empire, and the social circles that bring them together. Gardam tells of the rise and fall of Terry Veneering, the son of a mysterious Russian acrobat and a rough-and-tumble local girl living in the English midlands. As a child, Veneering is exposed to the ugly side of the British upper class and narrowly escapes death during the Blitz in WWII. Disgusted by the attitudes of the English gentry, and with his hometown destroyed in the war, Veneering sets off to remake himself in the Far East, only to return to England under suspicion. Gardam's previous novels have brought her acclaim in England, and with the right mix of publicity and word-of-mouth support, American readers, too, will respond to her witty style, insatiable readability, and cast of strange and amazing characters.--Paulson, Heather Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ON a list of my top reading interests, the lives of kooky geezers in a fading English village don't rank high. But all it takes is a page or two of Jane Gardam to force a reconsideration. Her prose is so perceptive and fluid that it feels mentally healthful, exiling the noise and clutter of your mind as efficiently as a Schubert sonata. She could make actuarial tables pleasurable. Gardam, whose first books, a novel and a collection of stories for children, were published when she was 43, is now 84, and "Last Friends" is the final installment of a trilogy that began with the highly regarded (by me and plenty of others) 2004 novel "Old Filth." An acronym for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong," it's a nickname borne by Sir Edward Feathers, who serves as both an archetype of the "funny new-old world" of the postwar years, when England steadily lost hold of its status and worldly possessions, and as a lovably peculiar figure who struggles as an old man to sort out who he was and what his life has meant. By the end of that first book - spoiler alert! - Old Filth is dead, but one thing you pick up quickly about Gardam is that for her no story is ever really over. Old Filth still inhabits "The Man in the Wooden Hat," the second part of the trilogy, which appeared in 2009, as well as this new book. In fact, "Last Friends" starts with Old Filth's memorial service in London, where two old friends who were never really friends see each other for the first time in years. Dulcie, the widow-matriarch of St. Ague, the town Filth retired to, encounters a lawyer named Fiscal-Smith, who invites himself to return to Dorset with her and stay for a while. Try as she might, Dulcie just can't shake him, until their time together is curtailed by a hilarious misadventure and then a sour parting, at which a wounded Fiscal-Smith declares, "I make no difference to anyone." Fiscal-Smith is a perfect Gardam creation, a supercilious prig who becomes more winning as you get to know him. "Born to be a background figure," he's the oddball hanger-on who craves acceptance and can never quite grasp why nobody likes him. There's a youthful version of him in every John Hughes movie, and many other stories too, but I don't know if I've ever met one who has carried this stigma into advanced age and almost turned it into a virtue. After Fiscal-Smith exits in a huff, Gardam abruptly switches time and place to fill in the back story of Terence Veneering, Filth's longtime professional and romantic rival in Hong Kong and later his neighbor and chess buddy in Dorset. If there's logic to how Gardam has structured this, I don't get it - but the truth is, it doesn't matter. Her effortless command of character and narrative sweeps you right along. The story of little Terry growing up in Herringfleet, a fishing village turned industrial town, is a richly imagined set piece that's also quite an affecting portrait of ordinary English life in the years leading up to World War II. Terry barely gets out alive before the town is destroyed by German bombers, the first of his many fortuitous breaks. And yet, midway through the novel, I started to slip from Gardam's spell, as she moved between the story of Terry's youth and Fiscal-Smith's meanderings. Then Dulcie returns to the picture, and we're knocking around back in Dorset, which has been ruined by "rich weekenders" who "came looking for 'The Woodlanders' of Thomas Hardy and then cut down the trees." The clarity of the prose never falters, but the storytelling slackens. If you're new to Gardam, this probably isn't the book to start with, but if you're a fan you'll most likely forgive the imperfections or even read happily through them. IT'S hard, in any case, not to be charmed by a writer with Gardam's substantial gifts. Among other things, she provides an unsentimental but oddly hopeful vision of old age. Yes, there's ample regret and sadness and the everpresent fear of losing one's marbles before the body gives out. But Gardam's old fogies aren't mere fossils. 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Library Journal Review
The missing pieces in the life stories of Edward Feathers (also called Old Filth, for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong") and his archenemy, Terence Veneering, are provided by their contemporaries Dulcie Williams and Fred Fiscal-Smith, who find themselves attending the funeral of Sir Edward as the last survivors of a community of British expats from the postwar years in Hong Kong. Where Feathers started life blessed with good looks and good connections, Veneering (born Varenski) came by his luck more haphazardly-through self-invention, a protective mother, and benevolent patrons. Despite their divergent beginnings, the two have followed strikingly similar paths, both practicing commercial law in the Far East and both loving the same woman-Betty, Old Filth's wife. By equally strange coincidence, Feathers and Veneering ended their days back in England, living next door to each other. Seen through the eyes of their former friends and colleagues, their history is patched together and fleshed out. VERDICT What this final chapter in the Old Filth trilogy (Old Filth; The Man in the Wooden Hat) lacks in originality, it makes up for in the pleasures of reacquaintance; for all who loved Gardam's dear old eccentrics.-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
