JG Farrell is up for the 'Lost Booker', and he should win because in 40 years his book Troubleshas lost none of its power, writes ALAN O'RIORDAN
IN AUGUST 1979, JG Farrell was fishing off the rocks near his home on Sheep's Head, Co Cork, when he slipped, fell into the swell and was drowned. Certainly, death at the age of 44 left his talent unfulfilled, but even in the time he had, his achievements were of the first rank. His empire trilogy – Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapurand The Singapore Grip– is his monument and The Siegerightly won the 1973 Booker Prize.
Troublesis surely his masterpiece – an elegy to the Anglo-Irish aristocracy that was to retreat from public life and, to a large extent, the country in the years following independence.
Given the Booker penchant for historical fiction, Troubleswould most likely have won the prize save for a change in the entry criteria which meant no prize was given in 1970. This is about to be rectified, with the Lost Man Booker to be announced on Wednesday. Troubles is a justified favourite.
The novel begins in 1919 when English first World War veteran Maj Brendan Archer travels to the Majestic hotel in Co Wexford and the fiancée he somehow acquired in a careless moment while on leave. There, he finds a dilapidated hotel, the rooms of its upper floors “boiling with cats”, its Palm Court overgrown to the extent that what guests there are emerge from the foliage. The reader finds a perfect metaphor for imperial decline: the inevitable dissolution of the colonial project symbolised in the very luxuries of the ruling class. After a brief, farcical non-courtship, the major’s fiancée Angela dies. Although he vows to leave, he is drawn to the Majestic and through his humane, baffled eyes we witness its demise, as well as the eponymous conflict.
At times, Troublesreads like a cross between Cold Comfort Farmand The Last September: it has the absurd comedy of the former, and the historical intelligence and sad beauty of the latter. Farrell handles such shifts of tone like a master – which is what he was. For Irish readers, his letting a stranger be our guide is a masterstroke of defamiliarisation. After the terrors of industrialised war, the not-quite-war in Ireland is all the more strange to the shell-shocked major. After witnessing a shooting in Dublin he finds it "absurd that in Ireland an old man consulting his watch should be killed. In wartime innocent old people were killed – but Ireland was a peaceful country."
That is an eloquent “but” – it is the pleading “but” of the doomed southern Protestants, a class who couldn’t help feeling “it couldn’t happen here”, the disbelieving dilemma of the ascendancy class who lived in one of the “home nations” rather than one of the empire’s wilder outposts.
The storm clouds gather over the Majestic only gradually, news of barrack raids and attacks on policemen usually emerging from the pages of The Irish Times. This initial detachment is an apt imagining of the surreality of the Anglo-Irish situation. We move from the quaking sod into psychological terrain as Farrell fills in what he said history books left out: "everything to do with the senses . . . the detail of what being alive is like." His domestic scene is a fitting one, then, for his subject was a family drama.
