Old Filth by Jane Gardam

The voids of his ignorance opened before him. I'm still the foreigner. To them. And to myself, here. I've no background. I've been peeled off my background. I've been attached to another background like a cut-out. I'm only someone they've been kind to for eight years because Pat was a loner till I came along. I'm socially a bit dubious, because they know my father went barmy. And because of living in the heart of darkness and something funny going on in Wales. And the stammer.

Old F-I-L-T-H: "Failed in London, try Hong Kong." Such is the nickname of Edward Feathers, a distinguished and superannuated English barrister, born in colonial Malaya, served in Hong Kong, and now retired in Dorset. Old Filth captures Feathers toward the end of his life, just after the death of his wife Betty, and the sudden appearance of his old rival--and Betty's former lover--who's moved in next door. The death of his wife sends Feathers on sort of a mental loop, going over the facts of his long and complicated life: being sent away from Malaya by his father, being summoned back for protection at the outbreak of World War II, the ship being turned around because of Japanese attacks on Ceylon, the love affair with his best friend's sister, his first ventures into the world of law. In London's Inner Temple he is a kind of living legend, a link with hoary Empire--but for Feathers, the past is not past.

Old Filth is dedicated to "Raj Orphans" like Feathers: the children of British colonial administrators who were sent away, back to the motherland, to be raised by foster families. The through-line of Old Filth, if there is one, is Feathers' perpetual feelings of outsiderhood: first in Malaya, where he is the only white child among his first friends (interestingly, Malay is his first language), then in England, where his strange colonial background can never quite be accommodated. Feathers, by his own account, never loses these feelings of foreignness, even as he rises to a rank of elevated esteem--that esteem, of course, having only been possibly in Hong Kong, not London.

Old Filth is, in a superficial way at least, a comedy, or a muted sort of farce. There's something funny, you know, in the way Feathers makes it all the way to Ceylon from England, by way of Sierra Leone, being extracted back into the colonial childhood he's tried to put behind him, only for the boat to turn around--and for Feathers to end up hospitalized for months, racked by parasitic worms lurking in African bananas. There's comedy, too, when Feathers is appointed a special bodyguard to the Queen (at that point, George VI's wife Mary), and using a spare hour in London as an excuse to look up--and bed--his crush. Much of the humor, though, comes from the latter day Feathers, whose lurch toward doddering senility produces a number of goofy foibles and misunderstandings.

Some of this is funny, and Feathers as a character is engaging. It was interesting enough to read about the experience of a "Raj Orphan," a Britisher who, by virtue of being born in the colonies, never quite fits in anywhere. By the time Feathers is an eminence grise, the world he came from no longer exists, and he is in a way doubly out of place. (Old Filth, like Feathers himself, feels a little dusty and anachronistic; it was shocking to read about his reaction to 9/11 and remember that the book is not so old.) But it's also a book with more ideas than it can really handle, threads that get picked up and dropped: the cuckolding rival, the enigmatic cousins, the shrewd niece-in-law. The late reveal (spoiler alert) that Feathers, as a child, helped murder his malicious foster mother, seemed so strange and out of place that I can only assume I missed some key foreshadowing. Old F-I-L-T-H: "Failed in logic, tried humor." OK, that's maybe a little too far--but you try making the anagram fit.