The wooden hat of the title sits on the head of "a man on a plinth, the wood so black it must have lain untouched for centuries in some bog, the cracked wood perfect for the seamed and ancient face, heavy with all the miseries of the world ... It was clearly the hat that had inspired the carving." The relationship of the hat to the wooden man, the wooden man to "a thickset troll" who exercises a quasi-magical power over the protagonists perfectly exemplifies Jane Gardam's poetic method. Memories resonate with each other and echo across decades. People and places, the past and the present, are woven into threads of narrative which, drawn together, give the writing a marvellous lilting power.
This novel and its predecessor, Old Filth, have a symbiotic relationship: they are hugely enjoyable entities in their own right but the sum of them adds up to something more than the parts. Together the novels offer a view of England refracted through its colonial past. They are not exactly prequel and sequel, more lives recounted from different points of view - the male protagonist, Edward Feathers, in the first novel; the female, his wife Betty, in the second. Childhood, home and exile are constantly recurring themes but the real subject is love.
Most of the cast of The Man in the Wooden Hat are familiar from its predecessor. The owner of the hat - not wooden but felt - is the troll, the "dwarfish" and impossibly vain Albert Ross, otherwise known as "Loss", or "Albatross", or "Coleridge" or "Ancient Mariner". He is an "almost lifetime friend" of Edward and becomes his instructing solicitor, amanuensis and protector - even to the extent of warning Edward's wife never to desert him: "If you leave him I will break you." Notionally Chinese, but preferring to be known as a Hakka from the ancient tribe of oriental Gypsies, he compulsively conjures cards out of his hat and tells fortunes: he tells Betty that she has made "a prudent marriage not for love". Later he relents and apologises to her.
Edward is self-mockingly known as "Old Filth" (Failed in London Try Hong Kong), a name that sits paradoxically on this good, diligent, clever, tidy man who is a specialist in construction disputes. He keeps people at a distance in the English way - "a blank to everyone, but full of mystery". He's a Raj orphan, "born to an earlier England" in Malaya, then as a child bounced between colonies and institutions. Removed from his parents and deprived of a sense of home, he's forced to cauterise his feelings. He appears blocked from love - an emotionally depleted man who doesn't understand women - and yet Gardam never withdraws her mercy from him. In his estimation his wife is "a good sort". She grew up in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai and says of herself: "I have no aim. No certainty. I am a postwar invertebrate ... I have settled on exactly what my mother would have wanted: a rich, safe, good husband and a pleasant life. All the things she must have thought in the Camp were gone for ever." She possesses a sort of diffident determinism: she can't find a reason not to marry Edward.
In the first novel we see her largely through her husband's eyes and accept his partial view of her. In the second it's a surprise to discover that she's an able linguist, an expert in ciphers (a Bletchley code-breaker), a social worker and has, all her life, been in love with her husband's rival, Terry Veneering, whose son, Harry, becomes her surrogate child. Harry's death, and her own which follows shortly after, crowns the book with a beautifully orchestrated and touching conclusion. In the wake of Harry's death, she decides to leave her husband to join her lover. Her pearl necklace ("my guilty pearls") - a present from him - slips from her neck when she's planting bulbs. She covers the pearls with earth, looks up at her husband who is shooting crows with his walking stick and thinks:
"He's quite potty. It's too late. I can't leave him now."
But then she did.
That pitch-perfect death is typical of Gardam's writing. While the narrative is kaleidoscopic - letters (some unsent), flashbacks, scenes from a screenplay - it is always sure-footed. There's something Dickensian about it - Old Filth and Veneering's names, the part-conjuror part-guardian angel Albert Ross, the remarkable coincidences, the revelation of ancient secrets - but there's nothing Dickensian about the spare, subtle prose, glazed with irony and wit. There's a wonderful specificity of period and place and class which gives authority to even the most exceptional turns of fate.
If you take both novels together, they make up an extraordinarily rich account of a long marriage, the restraints, the compromises and the sacrifices as much as the secrets and the unexpected - and often unearned - rewards. "Betty was always ready to give," says Filth finally to Veneering, "whether any of us asked or not."
Richard Eyre's Talking Theatre is published by Nick Hern
