The Man In The Wooden Hat - From the Orange Prize shortlisted author
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Om The Man In The Wooden Hat
'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 'Her work, like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, has that appealing combination of elegance, erudition and flinty wit' Patrick Gale Filth (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) is a successful lawyer when he marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the War. Reserved, immaculate and courteous, Filth finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions. But Elisabeth is different - a free spirit. She was brought up in the Japanese Internment Camps, which killed both her parents but left her with a lust for survival and an affinity with the Far East. No wonder she is attracted to Filth's hated rival at the Bar - the brash, forceful Veneering. Veneering has a Chinese wife and an adored son - and no difficulty whatsoever in demonstrating his emotions . . . How Elisabeth turns into Betty and whether she remains loyal to stolid Filth or is swept up by caddish Veneering, makes for a page-turning plot in a perfect novel which is full of surprises and revelations, as well as the humour and eccentricites for which Jane Gardam's writing is famous.
A supremely literary and youthful book What a lot Jane Gardam knows about love and its accommodations; the rich contradictory play of desire and loyalty, the sudden storms of feeling that assail the edifice of a marriage. And how elegantly and intelligently and kindly she writes about the instinctive, tendril-like gropings of one human heart towards another What Gardam is particularly good at - and what made Old Filth so compelling - is creating for her characters façades of complete conventionality, which are then chipped away to reveal strange internal workings...But one need not be familiar with Filth's history to be moved by Betty's final summation of her long marriage...in a novel preoccupied by the fear of becoming old, anachronistic and obsolete, this late- flowering love stands as a reminder that time does not just decay, it ripens too Gardam's writing is like painting on glass: vivid and translucent The characters tell their own stories through flashes of thought and perfectly pitched dialogue [A] delicious new novel . . . Gardam's writing is lyrical and never strains . . . brimming with a celebratory attitude to language Delicious and poignant . . . there are rich complexities of chronology, settings and characters, all manipulated with marvellous dexterity One of the few feats that's harder than doing justice to a complicated marriage is doing justice to it twice. ..On its own, The Man in the Wooden Hat is funny and affecting, but read alongside Old Filth, it's remarkable