| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
`[a] delicious new novel...Gardam's writing is lyrical and never strains...brimming with a celebratory attitude to language.' --Financial Times
`Hilarious but also deeply touching' --Reader's Digest
`an extraordinarily rich account of a long marriage, the restraints, the compromises and the sacrifices' --The Guardian
`Delicious and poignant...there are rich complexities of chronology, settings and characters, all manipulated with marvellous dexterity' --The Spectator
`Gardam's writing is like painting on glass: vivid and translucent'. --Independent
"...The characters tell their own stories through flashes of thought and perfectly pitched dialogue..."
--The Independant on Sunday
`a supremely literary and youthful book' --Sunday Times
"full of wit and precision"
--The Oldie
"stylish, Woolfian examination of a long marriage"
--Guardian
`a novel of exhilarating beauty and intelligence' --Seven magazine in Sunday Telegraph
`a special treat'
--Psychologies
`Hilarious but also deeply touching' --Reader's Digest
`an extraordinarily rich account of a long marriage, the restraints, the compromises and the sacrifices' --The Guardian
`Delicious and poignant...there are rich complexities of chronology, settings and characters, all manipulated with marvellous dexterity' --The Spectator
`Gardam's writing is like painting on glass: vivid and translucent'. --Independent
"...The characters tell their own stories through flashes of thought and perfectly pitched dialogue..."
--The Independant on Sunday
`a supremely literary and youthful book' --Sunday Times
"full of wit and precision"
--The Oldie
"stylish, Woolfian examination of a long marriage"
--Guardian
`a novel of exhilarating beauty and intelligence' --Seven magazine in Sunday Telegraph
`a special treat'
--Psychologies
Book Description
A box of delights - another masterpiece from Jane Gardam. The Man in the Wooden Hat is a companion volume to Old Filth, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Even better than its five-star predecessor,
By
This review is from: The Man in the Wooden Hat (Paperback)
This is a treat for those who have read `Old Filth', Jane Gardam's previous book about Sir Edward Feathers and his wife Betty (see my Amazon review), but also for those who have not read it (and will surely want to read it next), for, though the knowledge of its predecessor will add an additional layer of enjoyment, this book does not assume such knowledge. And anyway, significant though it is, there is only a modicum of overlap between the two novels (and there are even two small discrepancies between the events described).
The focus of `Old Filth' was on Sir Edward; here it is on Betty: we learn much, much more about her than in the first book. Edward we see as the kind of person he already was when they married - a workaholic and unable to give much emotionally; but we would have to go to the earlier novel to see what had made him become like that. The current book begins with their engagement and more or less ends where the earlier book more or less began. There are more disconcerting elements in the second book than in the first. The dwarf Albert Ross, who is devoted to Edward and knows him better than anyone else does, seems more spooky. His hat is an important part of him, and the title of the book suggests the great influence Jane Gardam attributes to him (though why the hat of the title is wooden we discover in a single image near the end of the book.) She even has him survive Edward, when in the previous book Edward outlived him - one of the two discrepancies noted above. (The other relates to a watch). Betty's behaviour when she has just been engaged (the oddest engagement, to be followed by the oddest wedding) is more upsetting and indeed hard to explain. There is in the first half of the book a note of hysteria. It is hard to believe that this could ever be a successful marriage. And yet it was - though at a price that will be fully apparent only in the last few pages. Betty does have to go through trials - and very movingly they are described - but her relationship with Edward is not the cause of them. We move back and forth between a retreat in the depth of the Dorset countryside and the throbbing life of Hong Kong. Again the writing is both funny and touching. It is, I think, an even better book than `Old Filth' - and I had given five stars to that!
29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Orphans of the Raj,
By Sarah Fellingham (Suffolk, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Man in the Wooden Hat (Hardcover)
I read this before I read 'Old Filth', and although this novel unquestionably stands on its own, it consistently gave me the feeling that it was making assumptions about its characters and perhaps unintentionally assuming that they would already be familiar from the earlier book.
One of the positives to be derived from this is that it doesn't hang about, doesn't linger self-indulgently. And one of the negatives to be derived from that in turn is a rather sketchy attitude to some characters and events. Terry Veneering, for instance, the oik rival lawyer to Eddie Feathers, the male protagonist, seemed to me more of a plot device than a real character. And I wasn't at all sure whether Albert Ross (the "Chinese dwarf") was supposed to have some kind of fantastical, mystical element to him, which in a way undermined for me the reality. That sketchiness seemed to me to extend to the narrative technique, which slips into using letters or screenplay, for instance, in ways that might sometimes seem just a bit lazily arbitrary. But they do contribute to the story being told clearly. Now that I have read "Old Filth", quite a bit becomes quite a lot clearer, so I think that's my recommendation: do read them both but in that order. Maybe they should be combined somehow into one book, with the parallel narratives merged. One small niggle: it's always annoying and unsettling to come upon factual errors; they always make you wonder whether there aren't perhaps more that you haven't spotted and don't happen to recognise. I don't think it was possible in the time of Attlee's government (i.e. 1951 at the latest) to fly from London to Hong Kong in fourteen hours with just one stopover, and it certainly wouldn't have been with British Airways which wasn't formed until 1974.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Old Filth" and "The Man in the Wooden Hat",
By
This review is from: The Man in the Wooden Hat (Hardcover)
I don't think you can review one book with out reviewing the other, just as I don't think you can read one and not the other. "Old Filth" was published in 2006. It is the story of Sir Edward Feathers, a noted jurist based in Hong Kong. His nickname - "Old Filth" - was at odds with his precise and personal probity. "Filth" stands for "Failed In London, Try HongKong". Sir Edward's life is written by Jane Gardam in not exactly a timely sequence; she starts when he is an old and distinguished judge, retired back in England, living life alone after the death of his wife, Betty. He meets an new neighbor who turns out to be an old enemy of his, a fellow jurist, also newly retired from duty in Hong Kong.
The main story in "Old Filth" is about Edward Feather's childhood as a "Raj" orphan. He was born to an English doctor and his wife in the British East Indies. His mother dies in childbirth and his father, stricken by his wife's death and becoming an alcoholic, basically turns over baby Edward to the care of a native nurse. Edward is sent back to England at an early age, boarding with first a family near Wales, and then entering boarding schools. World War 2 begins when he's about 17 and is on his way back to the Indies to live with his father. He is forced to return to England, where he is further educated in the law, and, after the war, goes to live in Hong Kong, becoming first a noted lawyer and then a judge. He's met Betty along the way, and she, another orphan, born in China to British parents who are die under Japanese captivity, make a long, mostly happy but childless marriage. "The Man in the Wooden Hat", published in 2009, is neither the prequel or sequel to "Old Filth". Rather, it is the companion piece. If "Filth" told the story from Sir Edward's point, "Man" focuses on the story from Betty's. Gardam's writing in both books is exquisite, spare yet right to the point. Both main characters are given equal weight, along with the secondary ones, most of whom are drawn as well as Betty and Edward. Both books are just superb; if I could give six stars to both, I would.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
