What a wonderful book! It was very well written and a perfection of a portrait. I was so into his mindset that I was as shocked and appalled with priests in jeans, and partnered couples as he was. The portrait was consistent and "true" for the particular man and for life in general. It illustrates how that no matter how successfully we cover over the past, it still dominates us. Also that behind our polished humdrum lives, we each have en eventful and lonely inner life. ( )

Jane Gardam has written a poignant and thoughtful book in 'Old Filth'. She has the ability to use an economy of words to draw very rich characters and scenes. How little we often know of people, and of what shapes their lives, their actions and their personalities! She writes very tenderly about old age, regret and memories. The book was so skilfully written and constructed that even though it moved about all over the place time-wise, as a reader you hardly noticed it. I also learned something about the Raj orphans - I had no idea that they were sent away from their parents at such a very young age.

My major quibble would have to be with the title. I know it's an acronym: 'Failed In London Try Hong Kong', and I know it is ironic in both it's literal and acronymic sense, but even so it's just awful! ( )

When I picked up Old Filth, I expected a book full of Sir Edward Feathers's reminiscences about a life at the bar in Imperial England -- specifically, in the Hong Kong referred to in the title. ("Filth" means, for a British solicitor or barrister, "Failed in London -- Try Hongkong.") After all, this book was about the life of a solicitor who ultimately became a judge, reaching the pinnacle of achievement in his profession, and in a foreign culture at that. And what is life about, for a lawyer, but his triumphs and his wretchedly unfair defeats?

But this book isn't about a life at the bar. It is about the life of Sir Edward, from his earliest days on earth to his last. It is about an adult life full of wealth and regard, yet one that was not truly happy; professionally fulfilling, certainly, but with unhappiness lurking in every corner. It's a remarkable character study, skillfully written so that the reader makes discoveries from inferences while enjoying language so lovely that it sinks into the brain like a song.

Old Filth skips about in time, rather like an old man's reminiscences -- an odd and sometimes confusing structure, but one that works. One moment the elderly Sir Edward is in a hotel recovering from a sprain, and the next the child Eddie is suffering at the hands of a vituperative caregiver. Sir Edward's memories range from his birth in Malay (as Malaysia was then known), to a bitterly unhappy childhood in Wales, through prep school, World War II, Oxford and to the Orient. The memories are fully lived, almost surprises to the man. They are interwoven with his discoveries of truths he deliberately avoided or literally never knew, because he buried himself in work and in the rhythms of a staid, formal and out-moded Victorian colonialism. Old Filth's declining years are full of renewed acquaintances with old enemies, distant cousins, and former lovers, who inspire new memories that come unbidden. The sturdy old man he has become gradually makes peace with his life -- and, ultimately, his death.

I don't wish to say too much more about this book here, because it is so full of unexpected buried pearls, hidden amethysts and sudden kindnesses. And it surprises, too, with the occasional bright happiness of a friendship of old age or the dark despair of childhood secrets. Rather, I'd prefer just to urge you to go, find it, read it, and let's discuss it. It is one of the best books I've read in years, beautifully written and extraordinarily well-plotted, and I give it my highest recommendation. ( )

Old Filth by Jane Gardam is well-written intriguing portrait of the British children of colonialism. The book gives the reader a peek into the life of a civil servant under British colonialism. Old Filth was born overseas and raised first by a local nanny, then sent back “home” for his education. He worked his entire life in the legal establishment in Hong Kong, maybe not as a stunning legal scholar, but one who earned deep respect. He and his wife return to England in their retirement. The author does an excellent job of portraying Old Filth's proper behavior to the extent that it seems as if he is disconnected from life. At times it feels as if he sleep walks through life playing the role that the country and the era molded him to play. ( )

This is a wonderful novel; it is like an old sweater that you slip into and immediately feel comfortable. Sir Edward Feathers, aka Old Filth (which stands for Failed in London Try Hong Kong) is rich and retired in Dorset with his wife Betty, after a long, illustrious, successful career as a lawyer and judge in Hong Kong. Eddie was a Raj baby, i.e. a child sent at an early age from one of the far-flung outposts of the empire to be raised in England by relatives or foster parents, depending on the circumstances. In Eddie’s case, he is torn from the arms of a loving Malay family when he is four or five years old (his father having ignored him after the death of his mother after childbirth), lodged with foster parents (because his aunts are too cheap and self-absorbed to bother with him) where he and others are abused, slotted into a British public school, then on to war service which he spent as part of the bodyguard for Queen Mary, Oxford, the bar and Hong Kong.

Betty at one point muses, “Amazed, as she never ceased to be, about how such a multitude of ideas and images exist alongside one another and how the brain can cope with them, layered like filo pastry in the mind, invisible as behind the screen…”. And this is very much the style of the novel with layers of meaning and emotions that touch, glance off each other, join, co-exist, conflict, all explored with a gentle, sure hand that rings psychologically true in all respects. This is a novel about many things: the tragedy of stunted emotional growth and being, a search for love without really understanding the search, the emotional cost of lack of communication, the heartbreak of desires that glance off each other but never connect, the needs and secrets of life and lives lived.

Despite worldly success, Eddie’s inner life is turmoil from the day he his torn out of Malaya, a turmoil that he suppresses with various coping mechanisms through life, but the sad part is that he cannot truly love and, as he cries out at one point: “All my life….from my early childhood, I have been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone I loved or who cared for me. I want to know why”. Eddie is a good man, but he is emotionally neutered from his early life. He is sexually confused, not, I think because of latent homosexuality, but because he simply could not cope with the physical and emotional intimacy of sex. His introductions to sex would be funny if they were not at the same time pathetic and bathetic. This affects his life with Betty to whom he has always been faithful, but who had to “look elsewhere” for passion and we discover, though Filth never does, that it was with a man whom Filth loathed in Hong Kong but who later in life, in England, when they were both widowers, became a friend and a comfort.

Emotionally bereft, Eddie becomes a man who finds solace and predictability and comfort in externalities and institutions: his brilliant career as a lawyer and judge, his standing and life in Hong Kong, his marriage to Betty whom he does love, in his way. The novel is told from his perspective as an old man in England and how he copes or reacts when all of these structures fall away, the final one being the death of Betty which sends him on a crazy search for contact with people who were with him in the foster home, to try to understand what went wrong there and set him on the path he had for life. The sadness is that the potential for love and caring was there, but Eddie had built such defensive mechanisms that he could not break through them himself. As a woman from his past writes to him after Betty dies: “…everyone always loved you in your extraordinary never-revealed or unraveled private world. I am one of those who know that you were not really cold.”

Towards the end of his life, Eddie finds a certain peace in coming to grips with his experience in the foster home out of which the child most abused (Cumberledge) seems, ironically, to be the one best adjusted in adult life: “I wanted to express my pity…..My pity for her. For Ma Didds [the abusive foster mother]…..I cannot bear to think about the cruelty at the core of this foul world. Or the vengeance dormant even in children. All there, ready waiting for use. Without love. Cumberledge was given Grace. That’s all I can say. We were not”.

Gardam is a wonderful writer. She reminds me of Paul Scott, in Staying On, or Seamus Deane or John McGahern in her ability to capture a lifetime of emotion in a moment, with a very light brushstroke. At one point, Eddie and Betty are discussing their wills. Betty says that she hates making wills and then, “looking away, not wanting to touch on inheritances since there was nobody to inherit. She didn’t want to see that Filth didn’t mind”.

Strongly recommended.