Troubles, by J.G. Farrell
Troubles is perhaps the bleakest comic novel I’ve read. It opens with the narrator, unidentified, talking about the Majestic hotel which once stood on a peninsula in rural Ireland. Today, whenever that is, it’s a burnt out ruin littered with unusual numbers of small animal bones and great quantities of cast-iron bathtubs, bed-frames and lavatory bowls all showing how grand the hotel must once have been.
The unknown narrator comments that the Majestic had been in decline for some time before its end. A man named Edward Spencer had taken ownership of the hotel and managed it with the aid of a threadbare staff who catered to the limited needs of his guests and family. Those guests were a dwindling number of elderly ladies who had visited for years. Many of them had no other home. The Majestic then was a decaying hulk with only a few rooms of weak life left within it.
Troubles is the story of how a man known as the Major came to the Majestic, and what happened to him there. It’s also the story of how the British Empire lost Ireland and how ultimately it lost its empire.
This is a longer quote than I’d usually wish to include, but it gives an excellent feel for the style of language used and the sly humour that permeates the novel:
In the summer of 1919, not long before the great Victory Parade marched up Whitehall, the Major left hospital and went to Ireland to claim his bride, Angela Spencer. At least he fancied that the claiming of her as a bride might come into it. But nothing definite had been settled.
Home on leave in 1916 the Major had met Angela in Brighton where she had been staying with relations. He now only retained a dim recollection of that time, dazed as he was by the incessant, titanic thunder of artillery that cushioned it thickly, before and after. They had been somewhat hysterical – Angela perhaps feeling amid all the patriotism that she too should have something personal to lose, the Major that he should have at least one reason for surviving. He remembered declaring that he would come back to her, but not very much else. Indeed, the only other thing he recalled quite distinctly was saying goodbye to her at an afternoon thé dansant in a Brighton Hotel. They had kissed behind a screen of leaves and, reaching out to steady himself, he had put his hand down firmly on a cactus, which had rendered many of his parting words insincere. The strain had been so great that he had been glad to get away from her. Perhaps, however, this suppressed agony had given the wrong impression of his feelings.
Although he was sure he had never actually proposed to Angela during the few days of their acquaintance, it was beyond doubt that they were engaged: a certainty fostered by the fact that from the very beginning she had signed her letters ‘Your loving fiancée, Angela’. This had surprised him at first. But, with the odour of death drifting from the dug-out in which he scratched out his replies by the light of a candle, it would have been trivial and discourteous beyond words to split hairs about such purely social distinctions.
That quote comes from very early on and it created certain expectations for me. I had a sense of where the book was going. Yes, I wondered who the mysterious narrator was and what part they’d have to play, but I expected a certain kind of story. A story about an Englishman encountering a ramshackle and eccentric Irish family. Anyone reading this probably already knows the broad outline of that story as its usually told. I just thought that here it would be well written.
Troubles is well written. It’s not though simply a novel about an Englishman encountering a ramshackle and eccentric Irish family. That does happen, but this is no tale of Irish whimsy.
The Major is taken to the Majestic by Angela’s brother, and then left in the hotel’s echoing lobby. Nobody greets him. Nobody takes his bag. Eventually he finds his way to the Palm Court where Angela, her father and some friends of the family are taking tea.
The Palm Court proved to be a vast, shadowy cavern in which dusty white chairs stood in silent, empty groups, just visible here and there amid the gloomy foliage. For the palms had completely run riot, shooting out of their wooden tubs (some of which had cracked open to trickle little cones of black soil on to the tiled floor) towards the distant murky skylight, hammering and interweaving themselves against the greenish glass that sullenly glowed overhead. Here and there between the tables beds of oozing mould supported banana and rubber plants, hairy ferns, elephant grass and creepers that dangled from above like emerald intestines. In places there was a hollow ring to the tiles – there must be some underground irrigation system, the Major reasoned, to provide water for all this vegetation. But now, here he was.
When I talked about my expectations for the novel what I was really talking about was my expectations for its plot, and by plot I mean a sequence of events with narrative coherence and logic. A story with a beginning, middle and end.
Troubles has a beginning (the arrival of the major) and it has an end (the opening page tells the reader that the Majestic burnt down). A lot happens between those two points in time so it has a middle. Does it have a plot though? Is there narrative coherence and logic? Or is it rather a sequence of meaningless events conveniently bracketed by moments that have no ultimately greater significance than any others?
That’s one sense in which this is not a straightforward novel (though it’s not a difficult one either), and one I’ll return to. The other is that of course all this acts as metaphor. For the Majestic read British rule in Ireland, or even the British Empire itself. For Edward, his family, friends and guests read the English in Ireland, ruling over a local populace they neither understand nor respect.
As the book progresses the lines between masters and servants become blurred. The local villagers grow hostile. The Majestic sales on – a bubble of decaying order ruled by assumptions of status that the world increasingly no longer recognises.
I’ll put my cards on the table. Troubles is brilliant. In 2010 it won the “Lost Booker” prize (a retrospective prize for the year 1970 designed to cover books which lost eligibility due to a change in the prize’s rules around that time). I haven’t read every book that was eligible for the Lost Booker, but given the extraordinary quality of Troubles I’m not at all surprised that it won.
The Major gets drawn deeper and deeper into the life of the Majestic but seeing its decline does not mean he can stop it. The hotel’s structure crumbles while it becomes overrun with feral creatures: tribes of cats; soldiers serving in the black-and-tans; a pair of pretty and wilful twins who couldn’t care less for propriety as long as there are dances and new dresses to be had (Resolute Reader in his review sees them as a harbinger of the 1920s and I think he’s absolutely right).
The old order, both in the Majestic and in Ireland, is being swept away. It’s disappearing not gently, but in violence and brutality. The young are indifferent to its passing and the old barely notice it. In between are those like the Major who are old enough to be part of how things were but young enough that they still have to live in the world as it now is.
As well as all this Farrell has a marvellous turn of phrase. The Major attends family dinners where “… silence collected between the tables in layers like drifts of a snow.” Later the Major sadly observes a “… bath of peeling gilt and black marble in which, no doubt, many a bride of the last century had washed away her illusions of love.”
I wrote recently about how the comic novel fails to get the literary respect it deserves (I was inspired by a post to that effect at Tomcat in the Red Room’s blog). Troubles is the best example I could imagine of how a comic novel can also be a piece of genuinely exciting literature. It’s superbly written and operates on a number of levels but at the same time it’s extremely funny.
Farrell never loses sight of the human among the unravelling of Empire. He describes how the old ladies gain new energy putting up Christmas decorations and mounting little expeditions into the nearby village, fleeting moments of purpose. He brings out the Major’s bitterness brought back from the Great War and tamped down just out of sight. There is warmth here in the writing so that even in the face of the despair and tragedy that pervades the novel it’s possible to laugh while seeing quite plainly that really there’s nothing to laugh about.
I said I’d return to the question of whether Troubles has a plot, or just things that happen. It’s not actually the easiest question to answer. Ultimately though Troubles is subversive in part because it uses traditional narrative techniques but undermines them from within. The novel is a form of history. Like history it has a narrative, it has major characters and minor ones, it has a direction.
In truth though all that is a lie. History has only the narrative we give it. Historical periods start and end where we choose them to do so. Which individuals stand out is dependent not just on who did what but on what records remain and on the agendas of the historians researching them. The only direction history truly has is forward and that is mere fact – it isn’t a direction with purpose. History is written with narrative coherence and logic, but that’s just because that’s the only way we can understand it.
Troubles then as a historical novel reflects how history is created. Things happen, and from them a beginning is chosen and an ending. Certain characters are emphasised, certain parts of what occurs are given prominence while others remain in the backdrop. In the end though it’s all what Edward in an appeal to faith desperately wants it not to be. A random collection of desperate acts.
The Resolute Reader review I referred to is here. John Self reviewed Troubles here and wasn’t nearly as taken by it. Obviously I disagree with his view but a John Self review is never to be sniffed at. Sam Jordison of the Guardian also wrote about it here.