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Old Filth

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction

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Old Filth

By: Jane Gardam
Narrated by: Bill Wallis
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Summary
 'It's a cliche to compare novelists to Jane Austen, but in the case of Jane Gardam it happens to be true. Her diamond-like prose, her understanding of the human heart, her formal inventiveness and her sense of what it is to be alive - young, old, lonely, in love - never fades' Amanda Craig

'I love Jane Gardam, especially Old Filth' Nina Stibbe

'Her work, like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, has that appealing combination of elegance, erudition and flinty wit' Patrick Gale

'One of the finest writers around. Old Filth has stayed with me for years...Can't think of anyone who achieves so much with so few words' Sathnam Sanghera


Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood.

Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the demands of his work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away.

Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece that retraces much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history. Feathers' childhood in Malaya during the British Empire's heyday, his schooling in pre-war England, his professional success in Southeast Asia and his return to England toward the end of the millennium, are vantage points from which the reader can observe the march forward of an eventful era and the steady progress of that man, Sir Edward Feathers, Old Filth himself, who embodies the century's fate.©2004 Jane Gardam Classics Dark Humour Family Life Friendship Genre Fiction Literature & Fiction Satire Fiction Heartfelt Tear-jerking Inspiring
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Critic reviews

Superb... quiet beauty, sly wit and heartbreaking humanity... the author has poignantly distilled a life less ordinary into 259 unforgettable pages
I was really moved by it and know that I will cry all over again when I re-read it
Beautiful, vivid and defiantly funny
This novel is surely Gardam's masterpiece... On the human level, it is one of the most moving fictions I have read for years... This is the rare novel that drives its reader forward while persistently waylaying and detaining by the sheer beauty and inventiveness of its style... her cunning wit, moving deftly between scenes and eras, displays the tragedy of a vintage world forever passing away
Sharp, humane, generous and wonderfully funny, she is one of our very finest writers
It's a cliché to compare novelists to Jane Austen, but in the case of Jane Gardam it happens to be true. Her diamond-like prose, her understanding of the human heart, her formal inventiveness and her sense of what it is to be alive - young, old, lonely, in love - never fades
Jane Gardam's work is rich and diverse and she writes beautifully... She's a treasure of contemporary English writing
One of the finest writers around... Old Filth has stayed with me for years... Can't think of anyone who achieves so much with so few words
Her work, like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, has that appealing combination of elegance, erudition and flinty wit
I recommend it wholeheartedly for its economy, breadth of narrative, and its insight, humour and pathos
The last great book I read
I can't say I've read anything else like Old Filth, which stands out for me as a singular, opalescent novel, a thing of beauty that gives immense gratification to its lucky readers
A magnificent, deeply moving and compassionate portrait of an era and a sentimental education
What a spiky brilliant sledgehammer of a novel is Jane Gardam's Old Filth
Excellent and compulsively readable... Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters
Like Samuel Beckett, Gardam continually explores the corrosive loneliness of being alive and the courage it takes to continue... Readers will relish Old Filth for its compassionate wisdom, its comprehension of the way we lived then and live now, and for its absolute mastery of authorial tone - the product of a lifetime of experience and craft... It is a Rembrandt portrait of a novel... Don't miss it
Excellently observed and quietly moving... Gardam invents an apparently composed character, and then disassembles him into pieces which - on closer inspection - look jagged and in poor repair
Gardam pulls off the near-impossible trick of great emotional depth delivered with wingtip lightness... Her characters are drawn with rich humour, and Old Filth himself is a marvellous, moving creation whose company you find yourself sad to leave
Told with compassion and great style, Gardam seems to get better as she gets older (John Humphrys)
All stars
Most relevant
Very interesting, especially if you like Passage to India. Supplements one's understanding of the Raj well. The boy's childhood makes one's heart ache.

Interesting read

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Bill Wallace does an excellent job of portraying Old Filth and revealing his past life. A story gently told despite the terrible events of Feathers' young life. Events unravel in a subtle, gradual way and you can feel desperately sorry for the young boy while at the same time understanding Old Filth's lack of emotion in the living of his later life, and the telling of it. I felt quite close to Teddy in the end.

Very enjoyable reminiscences and life story

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A wonderful, subtle, sensitive book, uplifting and sad all at once, beautifully narrated, one of the best I’ve read.

Life affirming

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Really interesting era set during the end of empire before the second world war. Very well read and very well told.

Brilliantly told story of the Raj orphans

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A friend recommended this book to me and I was unsure whether to get the audio version, but I'm glad I did.

Engaging novel, brilliantly read.

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