Customer Reviews

Faith Fox

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Faith Fox is three months old at the end of this dark and witty comedy, which opens with her birth and the shocking, unexpected death of her bursting-with-health mother, Holly. Two-time Whitbread winner Gardam ("The Hollow Land" "The Queen of the Tambourine") turns her unsparing eye on the manner in which Holly's circle deals with her death.

Her busy husband, Andrew, turns Faith over to his ascetic, religious brother, Jack, and resurrects an affair with Jocasta, his brother's wife. Thomasina, Holly's shattered mother, shocks everyone by running off to Egypt with a retired general, never having set eyes on her grandchild. Thomasina's friend, Pammie, indulges her virtuous side at every convenient opportunity.

Faith is barely visible, handed off from Pammie's hired nurse to a Tibetan refugee on Jack's combination sheep farm and haven for the "underprivileged." No one ever has the time to take her to her paternal grandparents, who are too old and sick to make the trip themselves.

The anxious grandparents, and Jocasta's son, Philip, a brilliant, dyslexic boy who keeps Faith in the forefront of his mind, are the novel's most appealing characters. Acerbic and funny, but without the venal self-absorption of the rest of the gang, these three help work the story to a satisfying conclusion, as Gardam adroitly allows all of her characters at least a modicum of self-knowledge. This is a love story - in the most complex sense of the word.

The book was very cute, funny, and amusing. It gets 3 1/2 stars for amusement value, losing points for construction of plot.

This was a light read about the family of an infant whose mother dies in childbirth. The maternal grandmother, Thomasina, deals with her grief by running off to Egypt with a handsome general, while the father, who doesn't want to raise the child, dumps her on his spacey-but-charismatic brother who runs a monastery with his mysterious and unlikeable wife. Both barely look at the baby, which makes sense because they barely notice the child they already have. Meanwhile, the baby is being cared for by an older Tibetan woman who is staying at the monastery because everyone else is so engrossed in his or her own personal issues that nobody but the step-brother really notices the baby. ...Except for the paternal grandparents, who would notice baby Faith if they could. However, through a comedy of errors and poor planning, they are prevented from seeing her because it somehow is inconvenient for anyone involved to either bring them to the monastery, or bring the baby down to meet them.

It's difficult to know where the plot is going because of all the side-journeys into the various characters. This is not to say that the characters aren't amusing, or that the story isn't entertaining. I just felt as though I was being led on a journey that didn't lead anywhere. The final resolution of the plot came at the very end of the book, and was very abrupt. It wasn't until that moment that I realized what the main two threads of the story were (there were so many, how was I to pick the main ones?), but this brought attention to the fact that the bulk of the novel was comprised of loose ends, most of which the author never attempts to resolve except through a few vague references to where some characters end up, or who they end up with. Little attention is paid to "why" except in indirect observations by other minor characters. Mostly the characters are just left where they landed without any further comment.

One character after another is introduced, and the focus of the story keeps shifting. Most of the characters are minor ones but are all given the same attention and weight as the major ones to the extent that you aren't really sure whose viewpoint you should be following in order to get a grasp on the plot (Hint: Thomasina and the paternal grandparents, even though Thomasina's viewpoint is only rarely offered by comparison to other characters. To a lesser degree, Jocasta.)

All in all, it was a good book - NOT a "great" book. I enjoyed it, but probably won't ever read it again.

I loved this book. It features a tangled mess of people and portrays the insanity of families very well. It's funny and sad and very enjoyable. I loved the characters and the way they all spoke. By the end, I felt as if I knew them all, they seemed so real.

While the book title refers to the baby in the story, the book is not so much about the baby as it is about the relationships around her. I thought we would follow her as she grew up, but that doesn't happen. I wasn't disappointed - it was just not what I expected. And I mean that in a good way.

With the deserved success of her novel Old Filth, Jane Gardam has suddenly become a hot author in the United States. However, Ms. Gardam has been writing novels and winning awards for them in England for more than 20 years. Many of these earlier books are as good as, or better than, Old Filth -- good as that book is. Faith Fox is one of these earlier works, not generally known on this side of the pond. It is, in a word, wonderful. Ms. Gardam is a master caricaturist and a writer of beautiful prose. What is less well recognized, however,is how carefully structured her novels are, and how the structure always serves the plot. The title character in Faith Fox is a new born. Since the book ends when Faith is three months old, she has no active role as a character in the book. Rather, she is an event. Her birth, and the simultaneous death of her mother Holly, are two stones, thrown into the pond of people who, directly and indirectly are affected by the ripples of these events. The book then circles, carefully and with malice, around these numerous characters: Faith's father, grandmother, uncle, as well as spouses, neighbors, lovers and assorted others -- including an entire group of Tibetan refugees. Faith's birth and Holly's death disrupt the routine and largely pointless lives of all of the characters of the book, and Gardam spends the rest of the book dissecting, with the kind of wit and shrewd observation associated with Austen, how each of them tries to find a new, personal balance to life and their relationships. The book has a great deal to say about love, death and bereavement, responsibility, common sense and the wisdom of the old and of the young. A truly wonderful book that was a joy to read and lingers in the mind long after.

When Holly Fox dies just after giving birth to Faith, no one can believe it. She was a force of nature, irrepressibly healthy. Her mother Thomasina Fox is so devastated, she runs off with a 72-year-old general for a holiday in Egypt. She won't have anything to do with the baby.

No one, in fact, is interested in Faith. Her father Andrew Braithwaite hires irresponsible nannies and finally hands her off to his saintly brother Jack, who's running an experimental religious community on the North Yorkshire moors. When Andrew goes to visit the baby, he never sees her. All he succeeds in doing is sleeping with Jack's wife.

Almost everyone in the novel is dotty, deranged, damaged or pathologically selfish, except maybe the old Tibetan woman living on Jack's farm who feeds and cares for Faith.

Faith seems to stand for a faith in God or goodness that everyone is losing. Nobody will commit to Faith or even look her in the eye. All dressed up in swaddling Tibetan baby clothes, Faith has a big knitted eye hanging around her neck.

I enjoyed most of this novel immensely until towards the end, when the incessant dithering and blathering of the characters began to wear thin. Perhaps the story went on too long. Neither humor nor symbolism should be belabored. So despite Gardam's wonderful writing talent, I wouldn't rate FAITH FOX as highly as OLD FILTH and THE MAN IN THE WOODEN HAT. But I'd still recommend it.