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EXPATS
THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life.
AT THE moment, I have one child working abroad and another couple considering it. From their cosy English countryside childhoods, they have emerged as citizens of the world, and want to explore all the opportunities that world can offer.
It seems but a simple step across their post-tech landscape. But it’s nothing new — after all, a Victorian mother might have lost just as many offspring to the Empire. Expat life is a British invention. It just wasn’t always so easy.
Sir Edward Feathers, in Jane Gardam’s superb Old Filth, is an archetypal Englishman with no attachment to England at all. Born and orphaned in the Raj, he is sent to boarding school in a motherland where nobody loves him and grows up to be a lawyer at the Far Eastern Bar.
There, he is thought brilliant, but finds when he comes back to Dorset to retire that it all counts for nothing. The Old Filth of the title is the nickname by which his London colleagues know him: it stands for Failed In London, Tried Hong Kong. Poor Sir Edward — he can never quite belong.
We Brits didn’t only build the model for expat life, we’ve also provided its cliches: Surrey lawns in improbable climates, eating Yorkshire pudding beneath a boiling sun. In A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh takes that nostalgia for home to its satirical extremes.
Tony Last is a happy country gent until his wife deserts him. In a fit of self-pity, he joins an expedition to the Amazon and ends up prisoner in a steaming rain forest, forced to read aloud the works of Dickens for the rest of his life: a vision of expat hell.
The eponymous couple in Chris Pavone’s thriller, The Expats, are of the modern variety. Kate gives up a hush-hush job in Washington to accompany her husband on his new post in Luxembourg. But when sinister stuff starts to happen, she suspects her work has followed her.
It’s no longer possible to cut yourself off from home entirely. Our citizens of the world can’t escape their secrets and ties. Isn’t that good to know?