Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter releases on April 24 from Europa Editions in trade paper. I’ve already reviewed it on Three Guys. But having discovered that extraordinary vista of social isolation and its struggle for connection, I had to have another fix of Gardam so I’ve backtracked to Europa’s 2006 release of Old Filth which I hear is her best novel.
Old Filth did great sales in its 2006 release. But since then it’s been relaxing on the Europa backlist. I’d recommend that stores stock it again as a backup to Crusoe’s Daughter. Okay compromise if you want, and see how well Crusoe’s Daughter sells, then restock Old Filth.
It’s easy to say that the best stories are character driven but it’s much harder to detail how that works. It’s striking, now that I think about it, that both novels are named after a character…like Jane Eyre.
Is Old Filth a remarkable character? As if I were to say to the reader: Okay, now I’m going to tell you the story of a man with two heads and you’re going to be transfixed! Well no, not really, he isn’t.
Old Filth was a very wealthy and successful lawyer who ended up as an eminent judge. He specialized in commercial law, property law, contracts… As WW2 was ending, Filth realized that there would have to be epic rebuilding and that property and other commercial disputes would provide ample opportunities for a lawyer to become very rich. Our hero is shrewd in that practical way which allows you rate a Rolls early in your career.
Turn the page to the end of life’s story. We are introduced to Filth in his eighties, living in a fine English country house with his sometime neglected wife, Betty.
Here’s a scene I loved: Betty is gardening, digging holes to plant tulip bulbs. She’s wearing a strand of pearls. Lately she’s gotten careless. One night she even wore the pearls to bed. She’s never worn jewelry to bed before. Gardam excels at showing those small human eccentricities that indicate that the personality is finally fraying under the stress of a long life.
These pearls are quite interesting. They are not the real set. They are the secret set. Betty has two sets of pearls. Her husband thinks she only has the one set that he has given her. This other, secret set, were given to Betty by someone else. Her husband, being a man, can’t tell the difference. She sometimes wears the sets interchangeably.
But at this end-time in life Betty wants to deal with loose ends. In a sudden inspiration, she slips off the precious pearls and buries them under the tulip bulb she is planting. An old transgression is buried and order is restored. Now Betty has only one set of pearls.
Somethings wrong with Old Filth, isn’t there? You see the crack in the character. The marriage isn’t perfect. It’s outwardly successful because it stays emotionally neutral. Old Filth and Betty are a power couple, a successful couple possessing a highly qualified happiness. But it’s a compromise marriage and Betty has had to look for some kinds of emotional fulfillment elsewhere.
Only in a Gardam novel have I discovered characters who are unwilling to have sex with such panache. Usually the opposite happens with panache. As a young man, Eddie (before the Old Filth moniker) finds a woman in his room at the country house where he is staying. She has entered his bedroom in the middle of the night to offer herself to him. Frightened, he throws her out.
The central character is a compass that points in many directions from it’s central locus. Or it’s like the beacon of a lighthouse that illuminates reality, including other characters, with its own distinctive coloring as it sweeps around the circumference of the social ocean.
This is accomplished in Old Filth with a flashback technique that aces the technique. As the elderly life of Old Filth moves forward through the novel (It’s a chronicle of the character’s last days.), a series of sequential flashbacks light up Eddie’s earlier life as if those flashbacks were explosive blasts revealing the bedrock beneath.
Truths are revealed about the character that you never expected, from his childhood through his teenage and early adult years. Very little of the novel deals with Old Filth’s legal career. Only at the end of the novel, when we have reached the final flashbacks, is the start of his career in the law revealed before the final fade out.
The flashbacks are tied back into the story by Old Filth’s final quest to restore the lost contacts of his youth. To recall is to mourn. But some of the central players of Eddie’s youth are still alive.
If you’ve ever decided to look up an old friend, you realize how nonsensical this activity is. But you might do it anyway. Your old friend doesn’t exist anymore even if the body is still warm. We all move on and become someone else. And we don’t realize how much unless we are brought up short and reminded by these encounters with a lost planet.
One more note of eccentricity. I’ll never forget the hard-luck character who keeps artificial flowers in her house but still places them in vases full of water because she thinks that looks more realistic. Life examined reveals itself as weird and strange and we are all putting up a front to make our life seem more normal than it is.
I hope I’ve sparked your interest in reading some Jane Gardam…either Crusoe’s Daughter or Old Filth…from the wonderful Europa Editions.
Now I want you to go check your family’s garden to see if any pearls are buried there.
