"In those days the Majestic was still standing in Kilnalough at the very end of a slim peninsula covered with dead pines leaning here and there at odd angles." [5]
The opening of J. G. Farrell's
Troubles. Those days are 1919, and the Majestic is a grand old hotel in Ireland, by then fairly dilapidated. The hotel was bought by the Protestant widower Edward Spencer some years before; the vendor told him the hotel attracted a regular clientele, but what he didn't tell Edward was that very few of that clientele had money to pay their bills.
Edward has four children, the oldest Angela, a son Ripon, and teenage twin terrors, Faith and Charity. Angela has her Major, who arrives in Kilnalough at the start of the novel.
"In the summer of 1919, not long before the great Victory Parade marched up Whitehall, the Major left hostpital and went to Ireland to claim his bride, Angela Spencer. At least he fancied that the claiming of a bride might come into it. But nothing definite had been settled." [7]
Major Brendan Archer had met Angela in Brighton when on health leave in 1916. They'd kissed once, he'd returned to the trenches, and ever after he was receiving letters from "your loving fiancée, Angela."
Brendan is particularly hapless at the business of romance:
"Until now, incredible though it may seem, the Major had never considered that love, like war, is best conducted with experience of tactics." [253]
When the Major gets to Kilnalough, Angela avoids him. She was tubercular the whole time. ("I thought you knew.")
There was another prospect, but the Major hadn't even realized: she writes that he hoped he didn't mind, but after waiting, she eventually married someone else. "She oppressed him, though, by the intensity of her feeling for him, and that was the principal thing he now remembered about her. She had had a tendency to hug him violently, squeezing the air out of his lungs--it's distressing to be squeezed very hard if you are not trying to squeeze the other person back. One feels trapped." [255]
And there's a third girl he's attracted to: Sarah, but she's Catholic. After Angela dies he allows himself to fall completely in love, but just like with Angela, the Major barely talks to Sarah. After a year of aimless loitering, he bumbles out a proposal:
"Look here, I want you to be my wife." He could say no more. He could not move. He stood there waiting like a pillar of salt. He could see, though, that it was no go...
She said crossly, "Oh, I know you do, Brendan." [349]
Hapless!
All the while Brendan Archer is loitering in Ireland, and not getting married, the Majestic continues to fall down or is pulled down by desperate or angry Catholics; its owner, Edward Spencer is going somewhat mad in his attempt to hold up some sort of Protestant Irish standard. Major Archer, Edward Spencer, the Majestic hotel itself--almost a character in itself--are all of a piece: decaying, under attack, committed to vanishing and misguided standards, Anglo-Irish, ineffectual. If you're a symbol-spotting kind of person, the Majestic hotel is definitely a stand-in for the last years of the Protestant Irish Ascendancy.
The book ends with the arrival of the Irish Free State in 1922; the Protestants flee and the Majestic burns to the ground.
The book has a blurb on the back from The Guardian: "Sad, tragic, also very funny." Sad and very funny both are abundantly true; the tragic, though, is a bit more of question: it depends on whether you think they're so hapless, they deserve what's coming to them. And they might! 😉
J. G. Farrell wrote three novels in the 70s--this was the first--called the Empire trilogy, The remaining two are The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and The Singapore Grip (1978). Troubles won the Lost Booker for those novels that came out in 1970 and due to a rules change weren't eligible for any Booker Prize. The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker for its year as well. All three are great. All three focus entirely on representative members of the Empire; the subject populations--Irish, Indian, Malay or Chinese, respectively--are anonymous, nearly invisible. Did Farrell not want to appropriate the stories of the oppressed? Did he simply not know those people as well? (Farrell was born in Liverpool, but came from a Protestant Irish family of colonial administrators.) Or did the stories of hapless English in colonial settings just seem funnier? I suspect the last myself.
John Banville in a well-done introduction calls this Farrell's masterpiece. Could be, though I'd plump for The Siege of Krishnapur myself. Funny as this is, Siege is even funnier. It's also shorter and would make a better introduction if you haven't read any of them. But they're all three great and I suspect I'm going on to reread the other two as well.
It's the week of the 1970 Club, hosted by Simon & Kaggsy! Isn't that a cool logo?
My organizing post for this fall's club is here, with links to a few books from 1970 already on the blog. (Tony Hillerman, Brian Moore, Shirley Hazzard.)
Also:
"...how incrediby Irish it all is..." [24]
This is my trip to Ireland for this year's European Reading Challenge.
Page numbers are from the New York Review of Books edition shown above.
I'm hoping to get a couple more in this week. Are you reading something for the 1970 Club? Any favorites from that year?
