Faith Fox: A Novel

By Jane Gardam

Book Overview

Faith Fox is a sparkling novel of comedy and conversation, birth and death, and the differences between England's well-born and plain people from a two-time winner of the Whitbread Prize and Booker Prize finalist. This comedy of manners set in early '90s Britain centers around newborn Faith Fox, the daughter of the sweet, healthy, and hearty pearl of her Surrey village, Holly Fox, who inexplicably dies in childbirth. Faith's beanpole father can't and won't look after her. Holly's mother--a matron from Surrey's gin-and-tonic belt who is ostensibly full of good nature, good sense, and sociability--refuses to acknowledge the baby whose birth killed the daughter she loved. And so an extraordinary group of family, friends, and strangers converge to make sure that Faith Fox ends up raised well in the right hands. The concerned parties include an ascetic priest of an uncle in Northern England who runs a commune with his unfaithful ex-hippie wife and her precocious, lonely son; the Tibetan refugees staying there; and the splendidly bickering and ancient paternal grandparents. As Faith's future unravels amidst the shifting scenes of high society and low, the old and the young, Jane Gardam explores the English heart in all its eccentric variety.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 078671221X
• ISBN13: 9780786712212
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Losing faith

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.

complicated, messy

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.

Dark comedy of familial love

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.