The work of the British novelist Jane Gardam, who died on April 28 at 96, was frequently described as “strange” because, despite her long and prolific career, she eluded easy categorization. And people are, as she well knew, essentially lazy.
Lazy is one thing Gardam was assuredly not. She did not begin writing until she was in her 30s — she claimed to have started the morning she dropped off her youngest child at his first day of school — but went on to publish 22 novels, some for adults and others for children and young people (although she regarded the distinction as arbitrary), 10 story collections and one nonfiction book, to say nothing of reams of criticism and essays.
When she came to many Americans’ attention with the publication of the “Old Filth” trilogy, she was in her 70s. But in her native Britain, she had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978 (for “God on the Rocks,” a subtle story of family tensions between the wars, which lost to the more pyrotechnic Iris Murdoch classic “The Sea, the Sea”) and won a slew of other awards, including the Whitbread twice (for “The Hollow Land” and “The Queen of the Tambourine”). It would not be too strong to say she was regarded as something of a national treasure, although she would most likely have raised an eyebrow at both the coziness and the cliché.
About Gardam’s vast body of work one can make few generalizations, save that whatever one’s taste, it would be nearly impossible not to connect to something. Readers who loved “Old Filth” (which stands for “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong” and was based in part on her husband’s legal career) might have been either delighted or puzzled by its two sequels: “The Man in the Wooden Hat,” which is devoted to a deliberately unsympathetic protagonist; and the spare, unsentimental “Last Friends,” about the only people left standing after the first two volumes. “Faith Fox” is set in a version of the 1990s and tinged with religion. “Crusoe’s Daughter” concludes with a few mysterious pages of stage dialogue; “The Flight of the Maidens” is a straightforward historical.
She paid no attention to literary fashion, but to call her a holdover from another era, or nostalgic, would be reductive, too. Gardam was not an English novelist, a women’s novelist, an experimental novelist or a traditionalist — although at times she was all of these.
