Patrick Skene-Catling

Rich pickings

Delicious is a word that keeps coming to mind as one reads Jane Gardam’s new novel.

issue 12 September 2009

Delicious is a word that keeps coming to mind as one reads Jane Gardam’s new novel.

Delicious is a word that keeps coming to mind as one reads Jane Gardam’s new novel. Delicious and poignant. The 81-year-old author’s mood is elegiac, and so eventually is that of Elizabeth, Betty, the wife of Sir Edward Feathers QC, who was portrayed first as the protagonist of Old Filth. ‘Filth’ is the acronym for Failed in London Try Hong Kong. Actually, his career progressed right from the start in a smooth upward trajectory, as a successful barrister in the Temple, an eminent judge in the Crown Colony. Now, depicted mainly from Betty’s point of view, the portrait is stereoscopic. She sees him as a stiff-upper-lip romantic, rather ludicrously conservative in his gentlemanly Englishness.

Betty, Scottish, born in Tiensin, survived years in a Japanese wartime internment camp in Shanghai, where her parents died.

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