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RETIREMENT
THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life.
MY FATHER-IN-LAW dreaded retirement and resisted it for as long as possible — but when it was finally forced upon him, he loved every second.
He’d started work at 14 — a schoolboy on the Friday, an apprentice on the Saturday — so God knows, he’d earned it. That new world of pub lunches, line dancing and gardening was the most wonderful revelation: he wished he’d done it sooner.
And when his poor heart gave out in his early 70s, in his garden as he laid a patio, he left us wishing that, too.
Life changes are always frightening, but they don’t have to be shocking. You could be in for a pleasant surprise. The hero of V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma Of Arrival has, like the author himself, had a great, long career, was born in Trinidad and travelled the world.
At the end of it, fetching up in Wiltshire, he feels like an alien. Yet there he finds a new life, ‘richer and fuller’ than that he’d had before. For the first time, he’s living in tune with the landscape around him, and discovers he’s seeing the world anew.
Last Friends by Jane Gardam is the last volume in her Old Filth trilogy. Those big, polished characters we first saw raking it in as lawyers in post-war Hong Kong are now aged and forgotten — in the ‘last scene of the last act’, as one character says.
By coincidence, or some subliminal dependency, they’ve all retired to the same corner of Dorset. Dear Edward finds his great enemy, Veneering, living almost next door.
It should be a disaster, but here, without all the trimmings of their previous profession, it seems they’re quite different people. Circumstances change, new friendships are born.
Deborah Moggach in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel doesn’t just give us hope for retirement, but comedy, too, which makes a nice change.
A group of elderly characters are ‘outsourced’ by their negligent relatives to India to a home that’s advertised as luxurious. They don’t find much electricity or hot water. But the love affairs, the adventures, the laughter? Bring ’em on.