BUY FROM AMAZON

The Daily Mail February 6 2004

A generation ago, the average life expectancy after retirement for a man was just two years. Old people didn’t linger long enough to become a burden to the State or discover the ingratitude of their children.

Today, thanks to improved living standards and health care, the elderly don’t so much die as fade away over decades of decrepitude. At the same time, their offspring work such long hours there’s no slack for an Aged P.

Who, then, is supposed to care for the elderly? Where are they to go? The ingenious answer in Deborah Moggach’s 15th novel, These Foolish Things, is not simply to pack them off to a retirement home but to pack the home itself off to the other side of the world. India. Out of sight, out of mind and out of Sunday lunch range as well. Thanks to globalisation, we’ve relocated our call centres to Bangalore; why not ship our seniors out there, too?

The idea is cooked up by overworked London NHS doctor Ravi and Sonny, his wheeler-dealer cousin from India. It offers double relief for Ravi from the dispiriting daily trauma of A&E and the presence in his house of father-in-law Norman, a sex-obsessed septuagenarian fugitive from the care home gulag, who is lured on to the scheme by the Eastern promise of Asian Babes who know the 'Kama Sutra' backwards and probably every other way too, expertise he needs after his prostate op.

The advantage of India is it’s cheap, and Norman’s fellow guests at Dunroamin, a former Raj official’s bungalow-now-private-hotel in Bangalore, are economic migrants hoping to eke out their remaining years in a gentility no longer possible in the UK. All have their own reasons for joining a group Moggach sweetly describes as ‘predominantly beige’. Muriel has fled Peckham after being mugged, burgled and abandoned for days on a hospital trolley. Evelyn’s children are too busy for her in their antithetical quests for material wealth (son) and spiritual fulfilment (daughter). Madge is a merry widow after a final fling. The only couple, the Ainslies, can no longer afford at home the life of travelling and sight-seeing that has enabled them to get through life without talking to one another.

Dunroamin recreates middle-class England as it used to be: servants, no crime, no money worries, no rush. Cultural differences appear limited to the absence of cheese and having to watch EastEnders in the wrong order on videos from home.
But India is not so easily shut out, and what develops is a hilarious comedy of manners as the old people venture out into their adopted country and are changed by the experience, finding a confirmation in the country’s spirituality of what their own long lives have hinted at. How can the local people accept such overwhelming poverty other than through their indifference to materialism?

In a telling scene, a man gives the shoes he bought when he first met his wife working in a shoe shop and has kept for years for sentimental reasons to a legless beggar. It’s things that are the problem; the foolish things we cling to that impoverish our lives and never quite fill the void left by an absence of love and affection. That’s why we abandon our old folk.

That said, it would be wrong to reduce the complexities of this fine, funny novel to a single statement. As we have come to expect, Moggach again demonstrates that she has no contemporary equal in marshalling a large cast of characters and a raft of ideas to produce a pacy, engrossing narrative that lingers long after the list page has been, regrettably, turned.

Highly recommended.

Waiting for the end

M. John Harrison - Review of These Foolish Things

TLS February 6 2004

“Old age is not for cissies”, Evelyn Greenslade’s husband tells her, then dies and leaves her to it. Some years later, puzzled, tremulous and unable to afford England any more, she finds herself living in the Dunroamin Retirement Hotel, Bangalore.

We have to think of somewhere to put the old people. Pension funds collapse, investments are mismanaged, sectors public and private fail to meet demand, New Labour backs anxiously away looking for somewhere to wash its hands: it is a pensions time bomb. Inevitable, then, that the retirement industry, like all the others, should offshore itself to the warmer economic climate of the East. This idea, beginning like many business notions as a piece of cheap rhetoric, is the brainchild of an overworked London doctor, Ravi Kapoor, and his rapacious Indian cousin, Sonny Rahim. Sonny is in it for the money; Ravi is in it to get rid of his live-in father-in-law, a classically dirty old man called Norman who has just set fire to the kitchen while boiling some dirty handkerchiefs. “Big bucks all round”, Sonny promises. It is the “old people Business”. It is a once-in-a-lifetime idea. Besides, they’ll be doing the retired themselves a favour. Who wants to moulder away in Worthing (more trouble to reach by Connex South East than the Indian subcontinent by 747) when they could be tanning their wrinkles under a palm tree? Everyone is so much more mobile now.

To his exploitative haven – “twenty rooms with flowered bedspreads”, their mismatched furniture “shoved there on a temporary basis until somewhere better could be found” – are drawn, among others, Muriel Donnelly from Peckham who, despite her dislike of darkies, rapidly succumbs to magical thinking in a country where even a film poster can be holy; the gross Norman, driven by his quest for “coitus”, the only thing that reminds a chap he’s still alive; Dorothy Miller, who has given her life to current affairs at the BBC (“Dorothy knew, in her heart, that she came first with nobody”); and, of course, Evelyn Greenslade herself, a little sentimental, a little dependent, wondering if she will have the courage to “make the strange into the familiar”. They are all scared, and who wouldn’t be? Britain lies behind them, the place where they lost their confidence, clung to their spouses until death divorced them, then watched their children mutate into strangers; where things have gone so wrong that the birds sing at night like canaries detecting some imminent disaster. Before they left they caught a glimpse of the alternative to Bangalore. It was an empty lounge in a public home, the chairs “arranged around the walls…as if waiting for a significant event”.

Ironically, their new world is not dissimilar to the one they have been forced to give up, “an England of Catherine Cookson paperbacks and clicking knitting needles, of Kraft Dairylea portions and a certain Proustian recall”. They eat Cooper’s coarse Cut Oxford Marmalade. They would sit on the veranda and do the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle, if only Norman didn’t keep the paper to himself. At night, they sing old songs, with words that list the things they miss. Outside Dunroamin it is a different story: enfeebling heat, limbless beggars, dogs nosing through heaps of rubbish. Bangalore, despite its rocketing property prices and high-tech business revolution, remains part of the old India. “Even the holy cows, wandering between the cars, were cruelly thin.” A young man with no legs watches Evelyn through the shifting haze of exhaust smoke. These Foolish Things has a big cast of characters: soon the reader sees the subcontinent itself is one of them, a demiurge as invasive as surgery, already busybodying about inside these old folk, giving and taking away. Some get ill, some get insights. Some get their sensuality or their sexuality or their original personality restored to them. One at least discovers she has come home. What they don’t recognize is that their lives could always have been this interesting if they had not been so determined to be safe.

Half the problem is that they are all, as Dorothy puts it, struggling against a sense of their own irrelevance. Deborah Moggach’s skill is to show just how relevant their irrelevance is. It is another of her neat, withering reversals, a technique which progressively ups the ante of the novel. The publishers describe These Foolish Things as “poignant and hilarious”. That is often true, although “savage and hilarious” might be truer. The lightness of surface, the quick little point-of-view shifts, the fluid misappropriation of sitcom-style dialogue, the jokes themselves, fail everywhere to disguise the author’s intelligence; while the original assumption breaks up as it expands, generating notion after notion like reflections on rippled water.

When Evelyn Greenslade first sees Dunroamin it is “bathed in a golden light, the light of long afternoons in her childhood garden, now tarmacked over to become the freight terminal at Gatwick”. It is a Kiplingesque light, the afterglow of the departed Raj now illuminating a site of bathetic reversal. Funny as this is, it isn’t quite enough for Moggach: the ironies of offshoring can be mined further. Just across the road from Dunroamin lies an enterprise run by one of Sonny Rahim’s business chums, a call centre from which young Indian men and women sell life insurance, cheque recovery schemes and, who knows, perhaps private pensions, to businesses in the London area. When Evelyn blunders in under the impression that there will be a telephone she can use, Sonny sees a new possibility. The old folk have nothing to do. They need to give and receive kindnesses. They need, above all, to feel useful. Soon, the telesales force are sitting respectfully in Dunroamin’s shabby common room, calling everyone “aunty” and sharpening their knowledge of English vernacular the better to sell financial product. “Mrs Greenslade, you are a genius”, Sonny congratulates Evelyn. “Please permit me to kiss your feet.”

If there is a problem with the novel’s constantly self-catalysing ironies, it is that after a while they become tiring. There are almost too many clever takes on things; too many conceptual dances with the situation; too many cheerfully cruel developments. But it seems churlish to complain that a novel – especially a comedy – is over-inventive. And you sense too that Moggach’s inventions are almost a by-product of her exuberance, her political impatience, her appetite for involvement, her sheer liveliness. In the end, underneath the ironies, These Foolish Things is a book about remembering – too late, or not too late – how to be alive.

The jealousies and quarrels of the old folk, their fears of abandonment, their drive to find common ground with people they don’t really like, their sense of being flung together by circumstance, are reminiscent of Olivia Manning. But Moggach, though she might like us to believe otherwise, is everywhere kinder than Manning, and more optimistic. Life generates the turmoil of places like Bangalore – the poverty, the pollution and the beggars with their soft voices and absent limbs: but it is a generator of possibilities too. Not to say a constant reminder that eventually all possibilities run out. Images of Evelyn’s fate abound. “Only yesterday she had opened a biography of Dr. Crippen, one of the books that had been left behind by other visitors, and found its pages crumbled to sawdust.” Old age, Deborah Moggach reminds us matter-of-factly, is a country from which nobody returns.

Read an extract from 'These Foolish Things'