Sir Edward Feathers, known as “Old Filth,” is, ironically, “spectacularly …ostentatiously clean.” His nickname derives from the fact that as a lawyer, he “Failed In London, Tried Hongkong.” A “Raj Orphan,” Filth is a child of British civil servants of the Empire in Malaya. Like other Raj children, he is sent back to England, alone, at the age of five or six, to begin school in a country he’s never seen among people he does not know. Gardam writes a powerful character study of this intriguing character whose fate it was “always to be left and forgotten.” Now in his early eighties and living in Dorset, his wife dead, he reminisces about the past and hints at some terrible event that took place when he was eight, living in Wales with Ma and Pa Didds, who took care of him and two young cousins. Sophisticated and subtle, this novel, shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005, is also compulsively readable with its poignant scenes and ironic humor. (A Favorite of 2006)
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Posted in England, Mystery, Thriller, Noir on Jan 14th, 2011
Involving the reader from the suspenseful opening pages, Kate Atkinson’s third Jackson Brodie novel is not a traditional mystery. Instead, it is a novel which grows out of the terrible traumas that children and young people must endure when people they love die violently. So marked are they by their sudden tragedies, that they never really escape their pasts, and may spend the rest of their lives wondering “when will there be good news.” Five separate plot lines evolve and occasionally overlap here, and in each of these plots the main characters are all needy people hiding an inner loneliness from which they would like to escape. Atkinson’s narrative speeds along, enhanced by her skillful pacing as she introduces new elements and surprises to her myriad plot lines, and she is especially adept at creating understanding and empathy for her characters, each of whom is individualized.
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When Mrs. Palfrey, a genteel, elderly widow, arrives with her possessions at the formerly elegant Claremont Hotel in London, she expects “something quite different.” Planning to stay at least a month, possibly permanently, she prefers her independence in this aging London hotel to living in Scotland near her daughter, who prefers to ignore her. A variety of elderly eccentrics call the Claremont home, and though the residents put up a good front, their loneliness and boredom are obvious. When she falls while walking one day, Mrs. Palfrey is rescued by Ludovic Meyer, a struggling young writer. As the two develop a close relationship, Mrs. Palfrey reminisces about her married life, teaching Ludo about the many kinds of love and all its pleasures, and he, having failed in past relationships, begins to understand what love means, blossoming under her attention. This 1975 novel is a sweetly romantic comic masterpiece in which old age is shown as a stage in life, one in which rewards and happiness are more important than the inevitable conclusion. (One of my Favorites for 2008)
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Chasing after her rowdy dog-pack one day, the Queen discovers them barking at a “removal-like van,” a bookmobile, parked outside the kitchen at Windsor. Entering the mobile library to apologize for the din, the Queen meets Norman Seakins, a young man from the kitchen whose primary interest is in gay books and photography. Feeling obligated to take a book, the Queen borrows a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, intending to return it the following week. Almost immediately, her life changes. That night, when the President of France arrives, she abandons her usual safe conversation and, addressing the president, remarks, “I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet…Homosexual and jailbird, was he nevertheless, as bad as he was painted?” In this wickedly wry novella, Alan Bennett explores reading, writing, and their effects on our lives as he develops this imaginative and warmly humorous scenario. (A Favorite for 2007)
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Focusing on the life of Henry James, Colm Toibin’s The Master goes way beyond the usual “novelization” of someone’s biography. Toibin has done a tremendous amount of research and has obviously read everything James has written, but he has so completely distilled all of this information, that in writing this book, he actually recreates Henry James. James, an American by birth, is a lonely and solitary figure throughout the novel, a man unable to form a committed relationship with anyone, either male or female, sometimes wanting companionship but not closeness, and always needing solitude to work. Through flashbacks, Toibin shows how James’s early upbringing may have been partly responsible for his feelings of isolation. Toibin’s dual focus on James’s life and how it is embodied in his fiction, give a powerful immediacy and sense of verisimilitude to this novel, so strong that one cannot help but feel an emotional connection to James, no matter how remote he may seem otherwise. (On my Favorites List for 2004)
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