Of all the manifold kinds of novel an author can write, the hardest is probably what looks like the most simple: the portrait. The life of an individual man or woman is a formidable artistic challenge if it is not to mimic biography. How to convey a sense of both utter uniqueness and universal humanity? How to describe the inner life of a mind, or soul, over a life-time? Very few modern novelists have the skill or the ambition to carry it off.

Jane Gardam is an exception. Sir Edward Feathers, nicknamed Filth (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) is a retired judge, an “orphan of the Raj” whose mother died in childbirth in Malaysia. A delightful man, we are told he is loved, admired and much discussed after his retirement, by those who believed him to have had an unimaginative and uneventful life. It is not so. His father gives him to the native servants, with whom he has his only experience of being loved before being cruelly sent “Home”. Like Rudyard Kipling, his experience is one of shattering sadism by the brutal couple fostering him; unlike Kipling (whose harrowing story, Baa, Baa Black Sheep is acknowledged here as the inspiration of the novel) Feathers escapes physical damage but is unable to manage emotion. “All my life…from my early childhood, I’ve been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone I loved or who cared for me. I want to know why,” he says. The novel is an exploration of his life, a detective story with a deep-buried murder at its climax, committed by a child.

Gardam’s pared-down style is perfectly suited to describing the thoughts and memories of an emotional cripple. The twin blessings of intelligence and good looks, plus a First in law at Oxford, make Filth, seem like a success even before his career brings fame and fortune: twice referred to as a coelacanth, he is a survivor of another era who has lived long enough to understand his essential unimportance. The sudden death of his wife Betty provokes a kind of nervous breakdown, unlocking “casements” in his prodigious memory. His close friendship with another schoolboy, killed in the War, his abortive journey out to the Far East in a convoy to his father during the War, his time spent guarding Queen Mary, are all revived. Cruelty and loyalty, ignorance and age, death and dream are superimposed on each other in a montage of small events which give a compassionate understanding of what is the eternal predicament of old age. Darting between past and present with a Sparkian skill, still hearing his wife’s voice on a kind of internal telephone, Filth embarks on a mad journey across England to find his two cousins, Babs and Claire, before ill health and old age fell him.

“I cannot bear to think of the cruelty at the core of this foul world,” Filth says, after making his confession to a priest, yet there is kindness, too, and a blind justice which suggests our prayers do not go unanswered. Betty’s string of fabulous pearls, given her by her lover, Filth’s old rival in Hong Kong, is buried in their garden with the tulips she plants just before dying. Deliberately childless, theirs is in every sense a barren marriage, yet the pearls’ discovery by a child in search of a football is symbolic of the way gifts get passed on, unknowingly – just as Claire’s son’s girlfriend, stung by Filth’s casual remark (“what child would want a parent like you?”), names their son after him. The source of Filth’s fortune as a barrister is due to his generosity to a Chinese refugee, to whom he gives his father’s watch, and who returns after the War in a white Rolls Royce to bestow his patronage on the desperate young lawyer. All Filth’s achievements at the Bar are forgotten, and yet we as readers know otherwise. When Filth, recovered, returns to Malaya, he finds Home, and, one hopes, peace. “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once” says the monument in the Inner Temple Garden, and with Gardam as his recording angel, we grieve for the lonely, damaged boy, and honour the man he became.

Gardam is one of the finest novelists alive, once short-listed for the Booker yet still curiously unknown to a wider readership. Like Beckett, she continually explores the devastating loneliness of being alive and the courage it takes to continue. Her best works (Crusoe’s Daughter, God on the Rocks, Queen of the Tambourine) explores her thesis with a pathos made more piercing because of the shafts of hope, and love, which she allows her creations. Readers will relish Old Filth for its compassionate wisdom, its comprehension of the way we lived then and now, and its absolute mastery of authorial tone, the product a life-time of experience and craft. It is a Rembrandt portrait of a novel. Don’t miss it.

The New Statesman, 2005