The Man In The Wooden Hat

Reviews

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 People and places, the past and the present, are woven into threads of narrative which, drawn together, give the writing a marvellous lilting power. This novel and its predecessor, Old Filth, have a symbiotic relationship: they are hugely enjoyable entities in their own right but the sum of them adds up to something more than the parts. Together the novels offer a view of England refracted through its colonial past . . . Childhood, home and exile are constantly recurring themes but the real subject is love 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 Expand reviews