God on the Rocks – 3/5 Stars https://www.amazon.com/God-Rocks-Jane-Gardam/dp/1933372761/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1512942968&sr=8-1&keywords=god+on+the+rocks Jane Gardam is most well known in contemporary circles for her novel Old Filth, which is a kind of running joke on “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong” and so that novel has a final moments of the British Empire in closing feel to it. This novel is an earlier one, from 1978, and takes places during the war. It has a 1970s politics feel to it alongside the feel of the time period in which it’s set. […]
It’s Not How You Start, It’s How You Finish
This final book in the Old Filth Trilogy gives us the story of Terry Veneering, lover of Betty Feathers, romantic and professional rival of Eddie/Filth. It also fleshes out a few of the secondary characters from the previous two novels, notably Dulcie Willy and Fred Fiscal-Smith. Gardam continues the recurring themes of being orphaned, alienated and lacking love within the context of pre- and post-war England (1930s into the 1950s). Each novel is told from the perspective of old age and end of life, which […]
The Problem with Keeping a Stiff Upper Lip
Book 2 of Jane Gardam’s Old Filth Trilogy focuses on Elisabeth “Betty” Macintosh, wife of Eddie Feathers (aka Filth). We know very little of Betty from Book 1, which was Eddie’s story. It’s strange because the reader might have expected a man married to one woman for 50 years to have had more to say about her. Yet, when we get Betty’s story, there is not much about Eddie either. What we see is that Eddie and Betty married each other as little more than […]
An Empire Orphan’s Story
For some reason, not at all planned, the first three books I’ve read this year have focused on childhood and the traumas that inform adulthood. Old Filth, the first book of Jane Gardam’s Old Filth Trilogy, is dedicated to “Raj Orphans and their parents”; also called “Empire orphans,” these children were born in the far flung reaches of the British Empire and then shipped back to England by the time they were 4 or 5 years old to be raised by foster parents while their […]