BOOK
REVIEW
THE
MAN IN THE WOODEN HAT
Jane Gardam
Reviewed By MARTIN LEVIN
The Globe and Mail
Who knows
what goes on inside a marriage. Perhaps not even the couple involved. I take
that back. Jane Gardam knows and her wonderful new novel (but then, they all
are), The Man in the Wooden Hat, could have as easily been called Scenes
from a Marriage.
The marriage
is that of Sir Edward Feathers, the titular Old Filth of Gardam's superb novel
of that name, and Elizabeth, or Betty. That she is dead as the novel begins is,
however, no impediment to the exploration of courtship and marriage that
unfolds here, gracefully, wittily, profoundly. No impediment at all;
Where Old Filth was Edward Feathers's story, this novel is decidedly
Betty's.
Even as
we're immersed in the present moment, there's an unsentimental nostalgia at
play, knowing the outcome as we do, knowing it from Old Filth to
begin with. What we get is a lifetime commitment that begins in infidelity (I
suppose one must call it that) and uncertainty, morphs quickly into love and
then a worried companionability, always under the inevitable shadow of Filth's
hated rival in law and love, Terry Veneering. (A scene in which Filth and
Veneering meet as neighbours is a masterpiece of comic understatement.)
Gardam is,
as always, highly attuned to the accidental nature of things, such as Betty's
own meeting with Veneering, to whom she is instantly sexually drawn, far more
than to the man to whom she's just committed. Characters happen upon one
another in unlikely but believable circumstances, weave unpredictably in and
out of lives. Contingency rules; things go one way, true, but they might so
easily have gone another.
Ultimately,
despite its wry humour, despite its forgiving delight in human infelicity, its
sense of the absurd, its nuanced understanding of just how very difficult it is
to arrange things well between human beings, this is, almost surprisingly, a
very moving book. It's the portrait of a marriage that, against the odds,
against temptation, against the contrasting characters of its pairing, against
the great disappointment of childlessness, against time itself, against the
greater attractions of another, somehow survives, perhaps even prevails.
One of the
great pleasures of my job involves the chance to ruminate over assigning
reviews (not always, I hasten to add, to the satisfaction of all). Occasionally
there are even great coups: A.S. Byatt reviewing Alice Munro, Annie Proulx on
Guy Vanderhaeghe, Oliver Sacks reviewing a biography of Glenn Gould. But once
in a great while, there is a writer to whom I arrogate that pleasure myself.
When it comes to Jane Gardam, I am not, as Shakespeare's Richard III tells an
importuning Buckingham, in the giving vein today.
As I've
written previously, I've come to Gardam rather late, but coming to her at all
has become one of life's great pleasures. If you have not yet found her, I urge
you to do so immediately. Perhaps, though, it would be wisest to read Old
Filth before embarking on the almost equally wonderful The Man with
the Wooden Hat.
I know of no
fictional enterprise quite like this one. A masterful novel, followed by a
collection of stories ( The People on Privilege Hill), one of which
illuminates both the novel that preceded it and the one that follows, The
Man in the Wooden Hat (the title reference I'll allow you to discover for
yourselves, as well as the chorus-like figure of Filth's card-throwing Chinese
dwarf friend, Albert Ross).
For its wit,
its compassion, its tragicomic view of life, its deep staccato probings of
human action, Jane Gardam's Filth series will rank as one of the great literary
achievements of recent years.
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