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3.77 AVERAGE
3.77 AVERAGE
On a sentence level, Gardam is excellent. But this last-book-in-a-trilogy seemed unplanned and frankly, unnecessary. A good chunk of the story is told in flashbacks, sort of filling in the cracks of the previous two novels. But they weren’t really cracks I was keen to have filled in. And the “last friends” – those poor saps still alive – don’t do much over the course of the novel. I do like how the prose style morphs to match the voice of the character we’re following. Dulcie is bouncy and staccato. Fiscal-Smith is rather conventional.
Gardam keeps you on your toes, so be prepared for that. The characters are so entrenched in their past that following their fragmented trains of thought requires concentration. You have to remember everything they remember. That tactic could serve to keep a reader immersed, but it didn’t work for me. I was feeling the itch for it to be over. Which is a shame, because some of that writing is cracking.
I do love all three books together though!!
This is the third (and last?) book of the series which started with Old Filth. I think it would have been better to have read all three books closer together rather than years apart since they cover much of the same ground but from a different perspective. As usual, people are never what they seem. Only the reader has the opportunity to get a glimpse of the character’s inner lives and backgrounds; to guess at what really motivates them. The coincidences, so charming in the first two books, beggared belief a bit in this one in my opinion. But they do drive home the prevailing idea in all three books that life is driven as much by luck as it is by ability.
The perspective this time more or less that of Sir Terrence Veneering aka Terry Venetski, Old Filth’s former rival and reluctant friend in old age. Jane Gardam could take anyone’s biography and make it fascinating. She has a fantastic way of making small details into big stories. But the first book is still the best, in my opinion. Last Friends may enhance the first book but it doesn’t surpass it.
These books will be friends for life and I will definitely re read them many times over.
And true to form, this series of books about a marriage more practical than romantic, ends with a love story about nostalgia, and the importance of being left standing.