Old Filth

There are few things more dangerous than an elderly English judge with excellent manners, a spotless reputation, and a childhood he has spent roughly eighty years failing to discuss.

Old Filth is Jane Gardam’s magnificent act of literary ambush: a novel that appears, at first glance, to be about Sir Edward Feathers, a distinguished retired barrister and judge, one of those men who seems to have been issued by the Empire in a dark suit with a neat parting and a talent for not making a scene. He is known, gloriously and horribly, as Old Filth — Failed In London, Try Hong Kong — which is the sort of nickname that sounds like clubland wit until you realise it contains an entire social order, several continents and a lifetime of emotional evasion.

Feathers has had a splendid career. This is important, because splendid careers are very useful for covering up the more complicated business of being a person. He has practised law, acquired dignity, lived abroad, married, retired, and generally given the impression of a man who has successfully arranged himself. But Gardam is not especially interested in the polished surface except as something to tap, crack and peer beneath. Under the wig, the title, the professional calm and the well-cut old-world formality is a child sent away, a life displaced, and a heart that has learned to survive by becoming almost legally inadmissible.

This is the Raj orphan story turned inside out: Empire not as parade, but as luggage, silence, exile and a nursery full of absences. Children are shipped about the globe in the name of education and respectability, then expected to grow into adults who can discuss port, property and precedent without screaming. Feathers does better than most. He becomes charming, formidable, useful, eminent. In other words, he becomes a very successful disaster.

Gardam’s genius is that she makes all this funny as well as painful. Her irony is beautifully dry: not cruel, but mercilessly observant. She understands the comedy of English repression, that miraculous system by which a person may suffer catastrophically provided nobody has to say anything embarrassing before lunch. Old Filth is touching because he is ridiculous, and ridiculous because he is touching. He is a monument to restraint, and like most monuments, he has weather damage.

The novel moves through memory, law, marriage, colonial leftovers and the strange afterlife of respectable men who have outlived the world that made them. It is elegant without being decorative, sharp without being showy, and quietly devastating in the way only a novel about good manners can be. By the end, you may feel that the British Empire was less a political system than an extremely elaborate method of producing lonely old men with excellent tailoring.

This Chatto and Windus copy is in Very Good condition, which is frankly more than can be said for the emotional arrangements of several characters inside. Crappy Old Books offers it for anyone who enjoys literary fiction with wit, wounds, judges, Hong Kong, suppressed grief, and the terrible comic dignity of people who would rather collapse internally than make a fuss in public.

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