This piece appeared in the TLS, February 6 2004

"Old age is not for cissies", Evelyn Greenslade's husband tells her, then dies and leaves her to it. Some years later, puzzled, tremulous and unable to afford England any more, she finds herself living in the Dunroamin Retirement Hotel, Bangalore.

We have to think of somewhere to put the old people. Pension funds collapse, investments are mismanaged, sectors public and private fail to meet demand, New Labour backs anxiously away looking for somewhere to wash its hands: it is a pensions time bomb. Inevitable, then, that the retirement industry, like all the others, should offshore itself to the warmer economic climate of the East. This idea, beginning like many business notions as a piece of cheap rhetoric, is the brainchild of an overworked London doctor, Ravi Kapoor, and his rapacious Indian cousin, Sonny Rahim. Sonny is in it for the money; Ravi is in it to get rid of his live-in father-in-law, a classically dirty old man called Norman who has just set fire to the kitchen while boiling some dirty handkerchiefs. "Big bucks all round", Sonny promises. It is the "old people Business". It is a once-in-a-lifetime idea. Besides, they'll be doing the retired themselves a favour. Who wants to moulder away in Worthing (more trouble to reach by Connex South East than the Indian subcontinent by 747) when they could be tanning their wrinkles under a palm tree? Everyone is so much more mobile now.

To his exploitative haven ­ "twenty rooms with flowered bedspreads", their mismatched furniture "shoved there on a temporary basis until somewhere better could be found"­ are drawn, among others, Muriel Donnelly from Peckham who, despite her dislike of darkies, rapidly succumbs to magical thinking in a country where even a film poster can be holy; the gross Norman, driven by his quest for "coitus", the only thing that reminds a chap he's still alive; Dorothy Miller, who has given her life to current affairs at the BBC ("Dorothy knew, in her heart, that she came first with nobody"); and, of course, Evelyn Greenslade herself, a little sentimental, a little dependent, wondering if she will have the courage to "make the strange into the familiar". They are all scared, and who wouldn't be? Britain lies behind them, the place where they lost their confidence, clung to their spouses until death divorced them, then watched their children mutate into strangers; where things have gone so wrong that the birds sing at night like canaries detecting some imminent disaster. Before they left they caught a glimpse of the alternative to Bangalore. It was an empty lounge in a public home, the chairs "arranged around the walls as if waiting for a significant event".

Ironically, their new world is not dissimilar to the one they have been forced to give up, "an England of Catherine Cookson paperbacks and clicking knitting needles, of Kraft Dairylea portions and a certain Proustian recall". They eat Cooper's coarse Cut Oxford Marmalade. They would sit on the veranda and do the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle, if only Norman didn't keep the paper to himself. At night, they sing old songs, with words that list the things they miss. Outside Dunroamin it is a different story: enfeebling heat, limbless beggars, dogs nosing through heaps of rubbish. Bangalore, despite its rocketing property prices and high-tech business revolution, remains part of the old India. "Even the holy cows, wandering between the cars, were cruelly thin." A young man with no legs watches Evelyn through the shifting haze of exhaust smoke. These Foolish Things has a big cast of characters: pretty soon you see the subcontinent itself is one of them, a demiurge as invasive as surgery, already busybodying about inside these old folk, giving and taking away. Some get ill, some get insights. Some get their sensuality or their sexuality or their original personality restored to them. One at least discovers she has come home. What they don't recognise is that their lives could always have been this interesting if they hadn't been so determined to be safe.

Half the problem is that they are all, as Dorothy puts it, struggling against a sense of their own irrelevance. Deborah Moggac's skill is to show just how relevant their irrelevance is. It is another of her neat, withering reversals, a technique which progressively ups the ante of the novel. The publishers describe These Foolish Things as "poignant and hilarious". That is often true, although "savage and hilarious" might be truer. The lightness of surface, the quick little point-of-view shifts, the fluid misappropriation of sitcom-style dialogue, the jokes themselves, fail everywhere to disguise the author's intelligence; while the original assumption breaks up as it expands, generating notion after notion like reflections on rippled water.

When Evelyn Greenslade first sees Dunroamin it is "bathed in a golden light, the light of long afternoons in her childhood garden, now tarmacked over to become the freight terminal at Gatwick". It is a Kiplingesque light, the afterglow of the departed Raj now illuminating a site of bathetic reversal. Funny as this is, it isn't quite enough for Moggach: the ironies of offshoring can be mined further. Just across the road from Dunroamin lies an enterprise run by one of Sonny Rahim¹s business chums, a call centre from which young Indian men and women sell life insurance, cheque recovery schemes and, who knows, perhaps private pensions, to businesses in the London area. When Evelyn blunders in under the impression that there will be a telephone she can use, Sonny sees a new possibility. The old folk have nothing to do. They need to give and receive kindnesses. They need, above all, to feel useful. Soon, the telesales force are sitting respectfully in Dunroamin's shabby common room, calling everyone "aunty" and sharpening their knowledge of English vernacular the better to sell financial product. "Mrs Greenslade, you are a genius", Sonny congratulates Evelyn. "Please permit me to kiss your feet."

If there is a problem with the novel's constantly self-catalysing ironies, it is that after a while they become tiring. There are almost too many clever takes on things; too many conceptual dances with the situation; too many cheerfully cruel developments. But it seems churlish to complain that a novel ­ especially a comedy ­ is over-inventive. And you sense too that Moggach's inventions are almost a by-product of her exuberance, her political impatience, her appetite for involvement, her sheer liveliness. In the end, underneath the ironies, These Foolish Things is a book about remembering ­ too late, or not too late ­ how to be alive.

The jealousies and quarrels of the old folk, their fears of abandonment, their drive to find common ground with people they don't really like, their sense of being flung together by circumstance, are reminiscent of Olivia Manning. But Moggach, though she might like us to believe otherwise, is everywhere kinder than Manning, and more optimistic. Life generates the turmoil of places like Bangalore ­ the poverty, the pollution and the beggars with their soft voices and absent limbs: but it is a generator of possibilities too. Not to say a constant reminder that eventually all possibilities run out. Images of Evelyn's fate abound. "Only yesterday she had opened a biography of Dr. Crippen, one of the books that had been left behind by other visitors, and found its pages crumbled to sawdust." Old age, Deborah Moggach reminds us matter-of-factly, is a country from which nobody returns.

Copyright TLS 2004.