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Old Filth by Jane Gardham
Sir Edward Feathers is "Old Filth", as in "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong"; indeed, this common acronym is said to have started with him and is now used as a half-affectionate nickname. Filth was a successful lawyer and later respected judge in Hong Kong, calling it quits just before the Handover.
This surprisingly moving book is not so much about Hong Kong (hardly any of the book takes place there) as the remnants of Empire, which of course lingered rather longer here in Hong Kong than just about anywhere else -- and growing old. But the story is largely told from the perspective of retirement in Dorset, where Filth, almost 80, has just been widowed.
Apparently loosely based on the life of Rudyard Kipling, Filth is a "raj orphan", abandoned to a Malay amah in the interior of Borneo, sent "Home" at a tender age when he could hardly speak English, and brought up by rather nasty foster parents, until he escapes to boarding school. Late in adolescence, he is evacuated to join his father in Singapore, only to be told that upon arrival in Ceylon that Singapore has fallen. During the War, he guards Queen Mary.
The novel moves back and forth in place and time from Malaya, to wartime London, to boarding school, to a beach in Freetown, to wartime London, to contemporary Dorset.
JANE GARDHAM's latest novel has been warmly received in Britain as a "superb" novel, which it is: poignant, understated, ironic, humorous and structurally adventurous. Out here, however, it hits rather closer to home, for Hong Kong readers will be left wondering whether or not Filth might not in fact be someone we might have recently known.
Gardham is a master of observation: the book is built anecdote upon anecdote. And the descriptions of Hong Kong are spot on: "the sky-high curtains of glittering lights … the comforting bottle-green bulk of the little Star Ferries that chugged back and forth to Kowloon all day and most of the night. This deck accommodates 319 passengers. Filth had loved the certainty of the 19."
OLD FILTH is also an "expat novel", a term which heretofore has generally been used with derision: shallow books about shallow people unselfconsciously floating on the surface of the place where they live. These are these sorts of expats in this book, but Filth is a different breed, for he is an expat everywhere -- a result of his upbringing perhaps, but that hardly matters -- an expat even when he's back "home" in Britain. Or perhaps home was where his wife Betty was, and when he loses her, he becomes totally adrift -- until the end of the book when he goes "home" back East, once more.
This is a book many Asian readers might mistakenly pass over: an ancient widower trying to come to terms with loneliness and his own mortality in an English country cottage sounds rather grim and hardly the sort of thing that would normally get one's blood racing. This would be a pity: many Asian readers, expats or otherwise, will find in Old Filth and his wife Betty shadows of people and couples we know … or perhaps ourselves.
Peter Gordon
26/12/2004
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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