The Man in the Wooden Hat Book

Just so you know where my prejudices lie: I read Old Filth then Man in the Wooden Hat and fell in love with Jane Gardam. So I am astonished to read negative reviews of Wooden Hat. In it, Gardam goes where so very few writers do.

Perhaps because I am no longer young, this book spoke clearly to me of the compromises, the subtle adjustments, the losses and the satisfactions of the flexible definition of 'love' over a lifetime. Because the characters are English and of a class and time where outbursts and emotional explosions are simply not done, it is all understated. Because Jane Gardam wrote it, it is beautifully written, evocative, immensely sensitive and (almost always)wonderfully controlled.

Filth is Eddie Feathers' story, and Wooden Hat is his wife's. Their love story is complex and nuanced: they don't love one another when they marry and never achieve the soaring romance both wanted when they were young. Each goes elsewhere for satisfaction of the passions (not simply erotic passions) they yearn for. They maintain secrets from one another that are eventually revealed, but never acknowledged, to one another. They build a love story from what life offers. They each maintain their own identity. Love does not conquer all but, eventually, it makes the rest of life possible and acceptable and satisfying enough. [In that sense, it is nearly an Anti-Romance: Lord Bryon and authors of paperback Romances would never write this book.] I am convinced by both the book and by having a few years under my belt, the story reflects some home truths about love mutates and matures to be something that sustains in a way that the wild yearnings of youth never anticipate.

I would have given it one more star because the book's theme is so rare and so very well done, it deserves to be shouted from the handy rooftop. I take away a half star because there there is a slight choppiness that is occasionally disconcerting. But that is a faint criticism. I love Jane Gardam.