The Man in the Wooden Hat [Paperback]

Esteemed novelist Jane Gardam follows up on the success of Old Filth, her highly successful 2005 novel about the life and marriage of Sir Edward Feathers, with the companion story of Sir Edward's wife, Betty. Each novel benefits from the other, the sum being significantly greater than the combination of the parts, and together they are a stunning study of a marriage--not ideal, but "workable." Feathers grew up unloved in Malaya, where his father was stationed. A Raj orphan by the age of six, he was sent back to England, where he went on to school, began a law career, and lived up to the old adage: "Failed in London, Tried Hong Kong," hence his nickname of "Filth." He never knew what it was like to be loved and cherished for who he was, and he always felt that he was an "outsider."

Betty, someone we really see for the first time in this novel, is also a product of the same time, place, and class. Living in Hong Kong, she sees Edward as "So pure...[though] there's something missing." More importantly, however, she believes, "He's very nice. And he needs me." Her friends all argue against her engagement to him, at least at this point, and even Betty has some doubts. After exploring the possibilities of real passion with someone more exciting, she finally decides that marriage to Edward "will not be romantic, but who wants that," a compromise which she believes will result in an overall improvement in her life.

Though neither Edward nor Betty is "in love" when they get married, they manage to form a good relationship and strong bond, considering the limitations of each. Betty demands a great deal of freedom within the marriage to pursue interests of her own, and Edward is so busy with his career that he hardly misses her--or the opportunities for happiness that have vanished from their lives with their separations. The parallels between the end of the British Empire, with its withdrawal from Hong Kong, and issues in the marriage between Edward and Betty are obvious.

The sophisticated and subtle style of Old Filth, appropriate for a novel about Edward, yields here to a more down-to-earth and overtly emotional style, more typical of Betty, with coincidence and fateful intervention playing a part. Edward's friend Albert Ross, sometimes referred to as "Abatross," symbolizes the stunted love and the guilt Edward feels about his life and inability to love fully, and the reader is constantly reminded of a line from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,"--"Alone, alone, alone on a wide, wide sea/," which could be Edward's mantra. The use of the supernatural, signs, and portents broaden the scope, while Betty's firm grounding in reality put these other-worldly motifs into perspective. The often hilarious (and ironic) dialogue combines with a wry satiric sense to produce a conclusion which is everything that such a novel deserves. Gardam's brilliance is best seen if this is read following Old Filth, a novel which, itself, becomes more "human" if it is read as the prequel to The Man with the Wooden Hat. Mary Whipple

Old Filth
The Queen of the Tambourine
The People on Privilege Hill

This is true literature - moving, thought-provoking, oddly humorous, utterly riveting - and the strangest love story I've ever read.

A technical tour de force as well, the novel is the backstory of Gardam's earlier book, OLD FILTH. That book describes a marriage from the point of view of the husband (Sir Edward Feathers). Here, we get the story from his wife Betty's perspective.

Both have had shocking experiences early in life, he a Raj orphan abandoned by his father and otherwise mistreated, she a survivor of a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai. Betty agrees to marry Edward because he's a brilliant advocate, getting richer every day, wildly handsome and thoroughly good. An hour later she meets his arch rival, advocate Terry Veneering, and falls passionately in love. Ironies abound as their lives unfold from this point.

The man in the wooden hat is Edward's best friend - eccentric Chinese dwarf and mysterious power in international law who becomes a kind of terrifying manifestation of Betty's conscience.

Gardam perfectly captures the poignant imperfection of humankind. Her characters develop under the sensuous influence of exotic places and the chilling influence of the very best British society. Awash in guilt and unspoken conflicts, Sir Feathers and his wife often manage to be happy. Anyone who has ever had a contrary impulse should find this book rather cheering.

I'd recommend reading OLD FILTH first, then quickly leaping into THE MAN WITH THE WOODEN HAT.

[3.5 stars] Even happy marriages are seldom simple. In this gentle novel, Jane Gardam revisits the lifelong marriage of Sir Edward Feathers QC, the distinguished judge who was the subject of her magnificent OLD FILTH (the acronym stands for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong"). But this time, she tells the story from the point of view of Feathers' wife, Betty, completing a diptych much in the manner of Evan Connell's MR. BRIDGE and MRS. BRIDGE. Born in Shanghai and interned by the Japanese, Betty somehow gets to finish her schooling in London and Oxford and do war work as a cryptographer before returning to China where she meets her future husband in Hong Kong. The date is now around 1950, but the chronology is difficult to disentangle. Eddie Feathers is a brilliant young advocate, though emotionally repressed; he needs Betty, but has difficulty opening to that need. She admires and respects him, but enters the marriage with little expectation of passion. Nonetheless, their bond endures, bringing a kind of contentment to them both; the story is essentially a series of flashbacks following Betty's death around 2000, while quietly planting tulips in her English country garden.

Jane Gardam writes with grace and understanding; whatever its weaknesses, this relatively undemanding novel is still a pleasure to read, which is why I give it four stars. But rating it on its own merits, I just don't know that it can stand on its own without OLD FILTH before it. Much less happens in it, for one thing; the whole book is essentially propelled by one surprising event near the beginning, answered by a parallel revelation at the very end. Betty's story has little narrative coherence of its own, and needs the armature of Eddie's career to support it. Surprisingly, while Gardam writes effortlessly from the female point of view, she penetrates Betty's character less profoundly than she had achieved with Eddie's much more opaque one. This book, I'm afraid, has the air of a spin-off, with less substance and less care for details; the anachronistic use of the word "jet-lagged," for instance, or the difficulty is establishing the chronology of Betty's earlier life. One significant chapter near the end has already appeared in Gardam's story collection THE PEOPLE ON PRIVILEGE HILL (which is mostly quite excellent and NOT a spin-off). The title, like "Old Filth," seems chosen for its outré effect, but it refers to a minor detail late in the book with little wider significance. And the character with whom the book does end, Eddie's instructing solicitor, an Anglo-Chinese dwarf named Albert Ross, has been portrayed hitherto merely as a shadowy melodramatic presence; there seems little reason for Gardam to end with him, other than the need to manufacture an effective punch line.

You may well enjoy this -- but do read OLD FILTH first. For others interested in a romance beginning in Asia just after the war, might I recommend Shirley Hazzard's magnificent THE GREAT FIRE?

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