Old Filth

Jane Gardam

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Old Filth won a BBC survey vote as one of the 100 greatest British novels. The complete trilogy about three British friends approaching their twilight years with bittersweet humor includes Old Filth, The Man in the Wooden Hat, and Last Friends, presented here in one volume. Emotionally distant but highly successful Edward Feathers, aka Old Filth, his beautiful wife Betty, and his devilishly handsome professional rival (and Betty's onetime lover) Edward Veneering are the anchors of this series, with each novel focusing on a different character. Feathers was a "raj orphan"—children born in Far East British colonies and raised in England—while Veneering managed to get out of his fishing village-turned-industrial-town just before the German bombs dropped (and his luck has held up pretty well ever since). The three tells a bittersweet tale of enduring friendship while contending with the disappointments and consolations of age, while a once-insurmountable empire declines around them. It forms a deeply humane and often comic portrait of aging, and a reminder that the experiences we choose to take with us in our twilight years are as unpredictable as life itself.