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Chosen for June by Tom Cunliffe of A Common Reader
The Man in the Wooden Hat opens with Edward Feathers, then a young barrister, waiting in Heathrow airport with his right-hand man Albert Ross. Edward has proposed to Elisabeth a Scottish girl, born in, and is waiting to hear her answer. The book follows the course of these characters over the next fifty years. We drop in and out of their lives, sometimes at pivotal moments, often at more routine periods as Edward becomes Sir Edward and Elisabeth transforms into Betty. Obviously with such a long time period to be spanned in relatively few pages, the book is more like a series of snapshots, but perhaps a better word would be collage, for the episodes are carefully assembled to make a bigger picture which by the end of the book has made a coherent whole, satisfying in its completeness. Jane Gardam’s skill is in blending humour and pathos, the eccentricities of the characters seeing them through loss and disappointment with a certain panache which makes for entertaining reading. We see the decisions that people make are those they must make, the outcome of personality, and there is no point sitting in judgement on how people are and what they do, when in reality they have so little choice most of the time. But foremost the book is about marriage, particularly long marriages, which survive because people’s expectations were never high in the first place. The moment-by-moment thrill of the other person is not something which runs well with the accommodations and compromises which the years bring. Jane Gardam shows with great subtlety the power of a union which somehow survives despite not only external attacks but also those which rise up from within.
You can read the full review here: http://acommonreader.org/man-in-the-wooden-hat-jane-gardam/
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