Author: Jane Gardem
Host: Blanche at Open Book
Let's start with a bit of a plot summary, just to ground ourselves in the discussion that follows. Here's how the publisher describes our monthly read.
"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 (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English 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 regimen of 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."
This is the first volume in a trilogy, which includes The Man in the Wooden Hat, which tells the story from the perspective of Feathers' wife Betty and Last Friends, which describes the marriage of Edward Feathers and Betty seen through the eyes of Betty's lover Terry Veneering.
Insights and Opinions
+ Feathers' past is revealed slowly, through his present-day musings and some overheard conversations, and through flashbacks to his early life. It takes some time to adjust to what Chris called the "back-and-forthing," and since we haven't actually met any of these characters in the early pages, it's a bit of a challenge to track with names and what's really happening now, what happened then, and what may be Feathers' imaginings.+ Joanne, who had tried to read it in interrupted chunks, found that method impossible as you really need to sit with it and concentrate on it in a continuous flow. After finishing, she picked it up again to reread it, and couldn't put it down. On the second read, you appreciate everything that is being foreshadowed and which you missed on first reading.
+ Chris read the beginning, then skipped to the end, and then came back to the middle. "I felt like there was no order to this book, so why should I read it in order?" On the other hand, Chris enjoyed the writing if not the order of the book. But Blanche thought the slow reveal of people and events were the main strength of the book.
+ Liz found it fascinating that Feathers' seems to be two entirely different people -- one, the elder and entirely closed down Old Filth, and the other the young Eddie full of life and curiosity. His remoteness later in life is the understandable result of events in his life, and Gardem demonstrates a remarkable ability to make us understand the stiff upper lip of English gentry during that time period. Everything about his early life was designed to shut him off from other people. When we meet him, he is completely closed. Yet, he doesn't regret or even seem to notice this. His musings about Betty after she is dead are the first indication that he is capable of feeling love.
+ Vicky felt like the author must have had a good time writing this book -- being able to incorporate all of the historical elements, the war, the queen -- and then placing Eddie in the middle of them. "It really is wonderfully told," she said. "She does go outside of his point of view, but she does it kind of Virginia Woolfe-ish. There is a very skillful writer here. It's just spectacular."
+ Margy felt that Feathers' failed effort to write his memoirs "without statement or judgment" -- finding the task impossible -- summarizes the whole structure of the book.
+ We all agreed we would like to read the second book, which is told from Betty's perspective, as it's clear that Feather's views on Betty are entirely inaccurate -- a classic case of unreliable narrator.
+ The fact that this is a trilogy is perhaps reason enough for the slow reveal, but the book does stand on its own.
