About the Author
Jane Gardam has been awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature; has twice won a Whitbread Award and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She was awarded an OBE in January 2009.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley P eople lucky enough to have read Jane Gardam's previous novel, "Old Filth" (2006), will know that the nickname of its title character refers not to his state of cleanliness but to his youth. Many years in the past, Edward Feathers moved from England to the Far East in the hope of making his fortune. Old Filth is "an acronym for Failed in London Try Hong Kong." Try it he did, and made a great success of it. "A thoroughly good, nice man, diligent and clever," he rose steadily through Hong Kong legal circles, eventually achieving a prominent judgeship, a knighthood and, along the way, a wife. It was his story that Gardam told in "Old Filth," and it is the wife's that she tells in "The Man in the Wooden Hat." Taken together, the two are a British equivalent of Evan S. Connell's classics of Americana, "Mrs. Bridge" and "Mr. Bridge." Connell's novels take place in Kansas City during the 1930s, while Gardam's are set in and around Hong Kong in the last days of empire, though each begins and ends in a quiet little town in Dorset. All four novels are notable for their sure-handed depictions of particular places and times, but they are most distinguished for their portraits of the four central characters and for their accounts of the marriages into which they have entered. As to Gardam's pair of novels, what the old song says about love and marriage must be said about them: You can't have one without the other. They are a set, his and hers. To my taste, they are absolutely wonderful, and I would find it impossible to choose one over the other. While "Old Filth" is principally about the man, his dark boyhood at the mercy of a distant, unfeeling father, with the wife a rather shadowy character in the background, "The Man in the Wooden Hat" fills in her side of the story, in the process revealing itself to be an astute, subtle depiction of marriage, with all its shared experiences and separate secrets. The wife's maiden name is Elisabeth Macintosh, though everyone calls her Betty. Flying from Heathrow to Hong Kong not long after World War II, Edward tells his friend and fellow survivor of the war, Albert Ross, that "she's a good sort. Very attractive," and that "she's very lively. Infectiously happy. Very bright eyes. Strong. Rather -- muscular. I feel safe with her. As a matter of fact, I would die for her." This, as it happens, is something of a misreading. Betty is indeed attractive and smart, "a linguist and a sociologist and an expert in ciphers," but her childhood was every bit as painful as Edward's. As a small girl she was taken to a Japanese internment camp on the Chinese mainland with her mother and father -- a common fate for Brits in Hong Kong during the war -- and eventually she lost both of them. Before her marriage she tells a friend: "I have no aim. No certainty. I am a post-war invertebrate. I play mah-jong in my head year after year trying to find something I was born to do. I have settled on exactly what my mother would have wanted: a rich, safe, good husband and a pleasant life. All the things she must have thought in the Camp were gone for ever. Impossible for me, the scrawny child playing in the sand. Hearing screams, gunfire, silences in the night, lights searching in the barbed wire. I should be the last woman in the world to recreate the old world of the unswerving English wife. I am trying to please my dead mother. I always am." She doesn't really love Edward and senses that theirs will be a marriage short on passion, so almost literally on the eve of their wedding she takes a startling leap in that direction with her husband-to-be's most bitter enemy. It is an act of infidelity that she never repeats but never forgets, as she settles into a marriage that is happier, more companionable and even more fulfilling than she had expected but that nonetheless seems to her an echo of her mother's proper British colonial marriage. Still, by the third day of what will be a half-century with Edward, she knows she will need "an unassailable privacy with my own life equal to his" because she suspects that "this must be how to make marriage work." Edward loves and needs her with all his heart, but he is not an easy man to love or with whom to live. He is an unregenerate workaholic who is fully capable of ignoring her for days on end while he works on a case, and, what is worse, they are unable to have children. She had wanted to have at least 10, but perhaps because of her years in the camp (a doctor tells her, "You've put your body -- no, history has put your body -- through hard times"), she is unable to conceive and eventually has to undergo "a complete hysterectomy," a procedure sufficiently risky that she returns to London to put herself in the hands of "the best people." She has many more years to live -- we know from the outset that she will die "planting tulips against an old red wall" in her garden in Dorset -- during which she manages to transform herself from "a copy of her dead mother on her marriage" into "the wife of a distinguished old man." Even as she does her duty, though, the old desires and longings persist so strongly that at the moment of her death she is on the verge of succumbing to them. There is much more to the novel than the unfolding of Edward and Betty Featherses's marriage, including the mysterious presence of Albert Ross, a "Chinese dwarf," a "solicitor with an international reputation, only notionally Chinese," of whom Edward says: "Best person, just about, I've ever met. Most loyal. My salvation," but whom Betty immediately senses as a dangerous rival and threat. Suffice it to say that he knows her secrets and uses that knowledge to Edward's benefit. Probably it will astonish American readers to learn that Jane Gardam, who is almost unknown in this country, is now in her early 80s, has published more than two dozen books (several for children) and has been much-honored in England; she has twice won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year. No less surprising is that many of those books are in print in the United States, so there really is no excuse for her remaining unknown over here any longer. yardleyj@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Man in the Wooden Hat
By Jane GardamEuropa Editions
Copyright © 2009 Jane Gardam
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-933372-89-1
Chapter One
There is a glorious part of England on the Dorset-Wiltshire border known as The Donheads. The Donheads are a tangle of villages loosely interlinked by winding lanes and identified by the names of saints. There is Donhead St Mary, Donhead St Andrew, Donhead St James and, among yet others, Donhead St Ague. This communion of saints sometimes surprises newcomers to the area if they are not religious and do not attach them to the names of each village's church. Some do, for the old families here have a strong Roman Catholic tinge. It was Cavalier country. Outsiders, however, who have bought up the village houses and the old cottages of the poor, call The Donheads 'Thomas Hardy country' and so it is described by the estate agents.
And not entirely truthfully, for Hardy lived rather more to the southwest. The only poet celebrated for visiting a Donhead seems to be Samuel Taylor Coleridge who came to see a local bookish big-wig but stayed for only one night. Perhaps it was the damp. The Donhead known as Ague seems connected to no saint and is thought to be a localised Bronze Age joke. Nobody would call a child Ague and almost everyone suffers from aching joints. Even so, it is the most desirable of all the villages, the most beautiful and certainly the most secluded, deep in miles of luxuriant woodland, its lanes thick with flowers. The small farms have all gone and so have the busy village communities. The lanes are too narrow for modern-day agricultural machinery that thunders through more open country. Traffic danger in the Donheads is in the speeding motor bike or young idiot in a new car or the odd bus-load of the aged and infirm being taken to their granny-clubs in Salisbury. At weekends of course the rich come rolling down from London in huge cars full of provisions bought in metropolitan farmers' markets. These people make few friends in their second homes, unless they have connections to the great houses that still stand silent in their parks, still have a butler and are owned by usually-absent celebrities. There is a lack of any knock-about young.
Which makes the place attractive to the retired rich, professional classes. There is a wide scattering of lawyers who had the wit to snap up a property here years ago. Their children try not to show their anxiety that the agues of years will cause the old things to be taken into Care Homes and their houses pounced upon by the Inland Revenue.
In Donhead St Ague there is a rough earth slope, too countrified to be called a driveway off to the left of the village hall. Almost at once it divides into separate branches, one left, one right. At the end of the left-hand driveway stands the excellently modernised old farmhouse of Sir Edward Feathers, QC (retired) who has lived there at peace for years. His wife Elisabeth - Betty - died some years ago while she was planting tulips against an old red wall. The house lies low, turned away from the village, towards the chalk line of the horizon and an ancient circle of trees on a hill top. The right-hand driveway turns steeply upwards in the other direction to be lost in pine trees. Round the corner, high above it, is a patch of yellow gravel and a house of ox- blood brick but, apart from one impediment, it shares the same splendid view as Eddie Feathers' house below. The impediment is Feathers' great stone chimney that looks older than the house and has a star among the listed glories of the area. Maybe the house was once a bakery. The people in the ugly house above have to peep round the chimney to see the sunset.
They have been the same old local people there however for years and are even-tempered. The house has become a sort of dower house for elderly members of a farming family who don't mix and, anyway, farmers seldom look at a view. They have never complained.
One day, however, they are gone. Vans and cars and 'family members' whisk them all away and leave Eddie Feathers to enjoy the view all by himself. He is rather huffed that none of them called to say goodbye, though for over twenty years he had never more than nodded to them in a chance encounter by the road. He wondered, vaguely, who would be his new neighbours. But not much.
The village wondered, too. Someone had seen the hideous house above advertised for sale in Country Life at an astounding price, the photograph making it look like a fairy palace, with turrets. And no chimney in sight.
But nobody came to visit it for some time. A London firm of estate agents put up a smart notice down by the road which Edward Feathers fumed about, not only because of the vulgarity of having to advertise a house in The Donheads, especially in St Ague, but because someone might just possibly think that it referred to his.
Weeks and months passed. The right-hand driveway became overgrown with weeds. Somebody said they had seen something peculiar going on there one early morning. A dwarf standing in the lane. But nothing of any newcomer.
'A dwarf?'
'Well, that's what the paper-boy said. Dropping in Sir Edward's paper down that bit of drainpipe. Seven in the morning. Mind, he's not what he was.' (The paper-boy was seventy.)
'There are no dwarfs now. They've found a way of stopping it.'
'Well, it was a dwarf,' said the post-boy. 'In a big hat.'
A long interval passed between the sighting of the dwarf and the removal of the For Sale notice and then, one winter's day, a single van arrived and was quickly away again. Who had bought the upper house nobody knew. After a time Edward Feathers, on his morning constitutional to the lane-end to collect his Daily Telegraph from the length of drain-pipe attached to the rough handrail at the foot of the slope, saw that a second bit of drain-pipe had been fastened to the handrail of his neighbour across the lane. The paper was not The Daily Telegraph. It was thicker and stubbier and from what he could see it was The Guardian.
How insolent! To copy his invention for a rain-proof newspaper without his permission! He marched off on his emu legs, chin forward, plunging his Airedale-headed walking-stick into the road. He met a woman he often met on his morning walk, his neighbour Dulcie, bright and smiling as usual. When he had slashed his way by she said to her dog, 'So - what's the matter with him today?'
She did not know what was to come.
About a month after the newcomer's arrival a new telephone was installed at the ugly high house (The Donheads move slowly) and the newcomer used it to telephone the village shop in a more distant Donhead. He thanked them for the delivery of his daily paper and would the shop kindly put up a postcard in their window advertising for daily help? What was the going rate? Excellent. Double it. And stipulate laundry. The newcomer had lived in the Far East and was ashamed to say that he was totally incapable of looking after himself.
'Oh dear me,' they said. 'And no wife, sir?'
'My wife is dead. She was Chinese. I'm afraid she had no idea how to do laundry either. We had servants.'
'We'll do our best,' said the shop. 'You sound just like your neighbour. He was from Hong Kong way. He's a lawyer.'
'Oh.'
'What name shall I put on the card, sir? Perhaps you are a lawyer, too?'
'Yes, I am, as it happens.'
'Well, fancy that. You may be friends.'
'My name is Veneering.'
'Your neighbour is Sir Edward Feathers.'
There was a terrible silence. The telephone was put down. 'Funny one we've got now,' said the shop to Eddie Feathers' daily who was in buying marmalade for him. 'Not a bundle of fun.'
'Makes two of them,' said Kate, and half an hour later, letting herself in to the Feathers' domain, 'What about this then? Next door it's another lawyer and he's from Singapore-way, too. His name's Veneering. That's a queer name if ever. Is it Jewish? He's wanting a domestic, and don't you worry, I've said I'm not available. There's enough to do here. I'll find him someone but-Sir Edward, what's wrong? You've turned greenish. Sit down and I'll get you your cup of tea.'
Feathers sat silent, stunned out of thought. At last he said, 'Thank God that Betty is dead.' Over the way Veneering sat on by the telephone for a long time and said at last. 'I must move. Thank God that Betty is dead.'
After a long time looking at his fire, burning brightly in the great chimney Feathers also said 'I must move.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Man in the Wooden Hatby Jane Gardam Copyright © 2009 by Jane Gardam. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
