Jane Gardam, a novelist whose works captured with wit and concision the last rays of the sun setting on the British Empire and the lifestyles that were extinguished with it, died on Monday in Chipping Norton, England. She was 96.
The death, at a care facility, was confirmed by her son Tom Gardam.
Distinct from one another as planets, Ms. Gardam’s many novels are as thick with madness and self-sacrifice as Shakespeare and as fraught with longstanding misapprehensions as Molière. Her books are leavened by slapstick moments, farcical encounters and slippery characters who sometimes pop up where you least expect them — in other, unrelated books.
“The Queen of the Tambourine” (1991), an uproarious and surprising tale about a serious subject — a woman’s descent into psychosis — contains almost all of the ingredients above, and won Britain’s Whitbread novel prize (now known as the Costa award).
In it, the well-off, 50-ish Eliza Peabody writes increasingly intimate letters to a neighbor, Joan, as she insinuates herself into the perfect household she imagines across the street. This connection of sorts (she never gets a letter back) brings odd messengers, handsome strangers, gaudy earrings and other enrichments to her life.
In Ms. Gardam’s rich, ambling prose, a sentence can end up far from where it started. In one letter to Joan, Eliza describes, for pages, a nighttime walk through the town, passing the lighted window of Marjorie Gargery and her husband drinking from mugs:
“The Queen of the Tambourine” (1991), about a woman’s descent into psychosis, won Britain’s Whitbread novel prize.Credit…St Martins Press
“The darkened windows on the floors above conceal each a sleeping Gargery child stuffed with knowledge. As I watch, the windows all burst open and the children fly out of them and away, five Chagallic embryos. One clutches its little blanket, another a suitcase labeled “Anywhere,” one is baying at the moon. Take comfort in the cocoa, beloved Gargerys, while you can.”