Jane Gardam – 1928-2025

Posted: May 1st, 2025 | No Comments »

I had the very great pleasure of attending one of Jane Gardam’s last public events some years ago at the Rye Arts Festival in East Sussex. She entertained a full house who all knew and loved her work. It was a great privilege to hear her speak about her much loved novels, short stories and characters.

Her New York Times obituary this week described Gardam as the ‘Witty Novelist of a Waning British Empire’, and she certainly was that in part. But I think her trilogy of books: Old Filth, The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends, that tracked the end of empire lives of an old Hong Kong judge and Raj orphan Edward Feathers – Old Filth – his working class rival-in-law, Terry Veneering, and his frustrated wife Elizabeth from post-war colonial Hong Kong to a cranky old age in retirement in England. The Man in the Wooden Hat then retold the story from the point of view of Elizabeth (“Betty”), her early life in a Japanese Internment Camp, their marriage in Hong Kong shortly after WW2 and her relationship to Veneering, who has a Chinese wife and an adored son. And finally Last Friends which completes the trilogy by seeing the period through the eyes of Veneering, the son of a Russian emigre circus performer settled in northern England and a local girl, who finishes his army service in the war in Hong Kong and stays on to become Old Filth’s great rival at the Bar.

The Old Filth trilogy is an incredible master class in expansive story telling in a concise writing style, evoking post WW2 colonial Hong Kong, the malaise of the end of Empire and the twilight of lives lived in exciting places ending up in boring suburbs. Throughout the trilogy Gardam draws out the characters and their backgrounds/motivations in a masterful Rashomon style three books. If you haven’t read them then you really should (and they’re all still in print).

Gardam was nearly 100 – she had worked as a journalist, for a time as assistant literary editor of Time and Tide, where she met many influential people in English twentieth century literature including TS Eliot and John Betjeman. Her husband was a high-ranking lawyer, which provided much legalistic fodder for the Old Filth trilogy. She wrote much else apart from the Old Filth trilogy, but, for me at least, these three novels were her defining work.

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