Old Filth is a barrister, a QC and unlike Trollope’s great Old Bailey cross-examiner Mr Chaffenbrass, nobody could ever say of him ‘What a dirty little man!’ In spite of his appearance on this book’s jacket wearing a gown without a coat, Old Filth was always scrupulously neat and tidy. Halfway through an unremarkable career, he followed the one-time lawyer’s rule, ‘Failed in London, Try Hong Kong’.
Unlike the many barristers who have made fortunes in Hong Kong, he became a judge and then retired to Dorset with his wife Betty, where much of this beautifully written and strangely moving novel takes place. The truth about Filth, whose real name was Edward Feathers, was that he grew up to be emotionally stunted as, what Jane Gardam calls, ‘an orphan of the Raj’.
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