Now retired, Old Filth lives in Dorset with his long-suffering wife Betty. The novel switches to and fro between his life in retirement and the years of his childhood, school days and early adulthood. It is left to the reader to piece together his life out of all the memories as they are delivered piecemeal chapter by chapter.
Things are never fully explained. Why is there a headless chicken? What is the tragedy the children have experienced? Why does the author drop in this sentence? - "Eddie would finish her as he once finished a woman". Why is Betty so affected by a phone call, "Harry my boy is dead"? Why does she keep this from her husband?
Various objects are mentioned in passing then reappear later – ivy, pearl necklaces, an address book, a hairbrush. The reader is intrigued and reads on wanting solutions. It reminded me of Behind The Scenes At The Museum where artifacts illuminate the story. You get a hint here, a hint there, of events and relationships. As the book says, the memories are layered like Filo pastry.
Jane Gardam makes the case that the set of a person's life is determined by their childhood. Certainly this seems true of Eddie. "I was not loved after the age of four and half", he says. “I’ve no background. I’ve been peeled off my background and attached to another like a cardboard cut out". His Father, young, handsome, admired, is distant and indifferent, destroyed by shell-shock in WWI. His mother dies at his birth. Then a dreadful foster home with other children of the Empire adds to his trauma. No wonder Eddie didn’t want children.
Despite his introverted nature, women fall for Eddie. Isobel comes to his boyhood bedroom but he throws her out. Claire asks him to come to bed with her but he pleads a train to catch. Even in old age. Vanessa says to herself, "Why is he so attractive? He scares me.". He has sexual feelings but cannot deal with his emotions.
Looking back on his life Old Filth is full of regret but this general feeling of loss is levened by the humour Jane Gardham weaves into the book. There are lots of little asides. The conversation that he has with the headmaster when he's pleading to go and see Pat Inglesby in the Sanatorium could be out of Wodehouse. Sir's short, no nonsense chats raise a smile. 14 year-old card-sharp Albert Ross is a wordly-wise polar opposite to Eddie and greets him with, "OK, how's that? Find the lady".
Betty and the law had been Old Filth's anchors. But in retirement with no cases to try and Betty dead, he's adrift and all at sea. He's lost his bearings and buffeted by memories, full of regret and remorse. In Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Fowler feels guilty that his actions caused the death of Pyle. He says, “How I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.” Old Filth too wants absolution. He is not religious but near the end of the novel he asks for a priest and the final pieces of his story come together.
He makes a final journey back to the East, his true home, but dies when he arrives.
The last words of the novel are given to two judges sitting in the garden of The Inner Temple. One asks "Was he travelling alone, d'you know?" The other replies, "Oh, yes. Travelling alone. Quite alone"
But then, aren't we all?
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