Does anyone in a Jane Gardam novel call before visiting someone? Apparently not, because then she would be at a loss for plot devices. This was a minor detail implausibility in Old Filth, but it's impossible to ignore in Faith Fox. Characters are constantly crossing and re-crossing each other in a frenzy of missed connections, giving the novel the feeling of a table-tennis game. You have telephones, people. Use them.
Gardam published Faith Fox in 1996, eight years before Old Filth. It's striking to see how much her writing matured in that later work, and how far it had to come. Where Old Filth is nuanced and subtle, Faith Fox is heavy-handed and trite. In short: a groaner. A group of wayward folks, loosely linked by familial ties and their lost FAITH are drawn together by the advent of a motherless child named FAITH and through her eventually find their FAITH. Perhaps if they had a little more faith in telephones at the start of the book we could forget this whole mess. Next!
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