This is more controlled than the better known 'Siege of Krishnapur' and the Major is a far stronger character than any in the other novel. Still, I preferred 'Siege' simply because the action scenes are so over-the-top, hilarious in Farrell's own eccentric, unsettling way. Such eccentric humour runs all the way through 'Troubles' and throws light on the folly of doomed English colonial rule in Ireland in the same way as 'Siege' throws light on the situation on India. Part of the thrill of both novels is that they approach their subjects from such an unusual standpoint. It is not the done thing to write about the oppressor rather than the oppressed. But when the oppressors are so blind to the way history was to see them, they make for fascinating reading. ( )

“Hm… actually one of our guests wrote a sort of poem, you know, about how the place probably used to look in the old days. Lovely bit of work. Angela embroidered some of it for me on a cushion. I’ll show it to you later on. I think you’ll appreciate it.”

“I’m sure I shall, ” agreed the Major.

The dog barked, doubtfully.

The English author J. G. Farrell is best known for his so-called Empire Trilogy, the centerpiece of which, The Siege of Krishnapur, won the Booker Prize in 1973 and was recently shortlisted for the “Best of the Booker” – though John Banville, in his introduction to the New York Review of Books edition (I have the introduction-free British paperback from Phoenix, but the NYRB helpfully prints Banville’s essay on their website), feels that the first of the trilogy, Troubles, “is surely his masterpiece, and the book of his that is certain to endure.” J. G. Farrell died while fishing in county Cork in 1979, at the age of forty four.

The New York Review of Books reprints editions of out-of-print books, and that they have found it worthwhile to reprint Farrell’s trilogy is a credit to them and an indicator of how neglected the author is in the United States. Yet I imagine that people who happen across Troubles must be secretly grateful, as all great “forgotten” books discovered and relished by readers have something of the sheen of buried treasure about them.

Troubles must have been an anomaly in 1973 – there’s something quaint in its lack of postmodernist pyrotechnics, its patience, and its faith in the good old-fashioned unfolding of a story. It is a gentle comedy, almost slapstick (though the book doesn’t lack for dialogue there is something in the movements of the characters, of their errors and frustrations, and of their constant up-down-around the hotel, that caused me to think of them as being trapped in a silent film comedy), that never loses sight of the darkness closing around it like a fog.

The bulk of the book takes place in Ireland in the late teens and early twenties, though in the opening pages we are shown the Majestic, the old luxury hotel where events will take place in flashback, is nothing more now than a skeleton, having burned to the ground some years before, though

here and there among the foundations one might still find evidence of the Majestic’s former splendour: the great number of cast-iron bathtubs, for instance, which had tumbled from one blazing floor to another until they hit the earth; twisted bedframes also, some of them not yet altogether rusted away; and a simply prodigious number of basins and lavatory bowls.

And then back – back to summer 1919, where after a stint in the hospital the Major arrives at the Majestic, which is already in an advanced state of neglect, to marry Angela, a girl he met on home leave from the war in 1916 and barely remembers:

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 fiancé, Angela’. This had surprised him at first. But, with the odour of death drifting into the dug-out in which he scratched out his replies by the light of the candle, it would have been trivial and discourteous beyond words to split hairs about such purely social distinctions.

The Major is a bit of a buffoon, and the story is of his frustrations with women. He comes to claim a bride who acts indifferent towards him, then there’s the feisty Irish lass, and he finds himself stuck in an amiable madhouse that he’s unable to quite break free of. His English reserve and obsession with courtesy is borderline caricature that is contrasted time and again with the Irish; his inability to take a firm stance becomes his undoing. War has left him a little out of it, and he finds himself slowly – and, it seems, to his horror almost – feeling sympathetic towards the “terrorists.” But sympathy will not save him. It is only a matter of when the Major’s women troubles will recede and the violence and chaos, sprinkled generously as newspaper articles throughout the novel’s length, will take the fore. The author is patient. He carefully builds his house – from the get-go an amiable farce that just happens to be set in times of nuisance – and then, for the first but not the last time a quarter of the way through its length, pulls the tablecloth out from under and sends it crashing down.

But why write a book about the “troubles” in Ireland at the beginning of the century in 1973? Perhaps Farrell saw a current example of a powerful nation attempting to dominate a weaker one and excusing the ruthlessness of its behavior by dismissing the oppressed as “savages, ” backwards, in dire need of rescuing and civilizing. Farrell was too much the artist to make any such comparisons overt, but I doubt he failed to see the parallels. The book’s accomplishment, however, is that it is not a treatise on the evils of colonialism, or a tediously “political” book, but one that takes time to sketch characters and setting in fine detail. The absurdly decaying Majestic – an old ghost that the vines are rapidly reclaiming, with chunks of the ceiling annoyingly falling off onto the desk in the study, its owner slowly going mad, the dusty old ladies that won’t ever leave, and the alarmingly multiplying cats commanding the upper floors – is one of the great settings of modern literature. It is like the book itself: frequently hilarious and terribly sad. There is an element of lovingly recapturing a vanished world here, and the author is too generous to present any of the characters as truly hateful – at worst, misguided and to be pitied – but it’s obvious whose side he’s on. Troubles closes with a series of strange, hallucinogenic scenes until all that was there is no more, and we finally glimpse the Majestic as it was in the novel’s opening pages: as a burnt-out shell.

As in The Siege of Krishanpur, Farrell, in this book set against the increasing violence against the English in the Irish struggle for independence, created, in his characters, parodies of the English ruling class, holding them up to ridicule rather than sympathy for being caught up in a tragedy. In Farrell’s view, clearly the English have caused their own tragedy; he spotlights a (fictional) group of English people living at the deteriorating Majestic Hotel in County Wexford, Ireland as a way of demonstrating this belief.

The protagonist, Major Brendan Archer, newly “demobbed” from the army and still jittery from the trenches, arrives at the Majestic Hotel to see his “fiancée”—if that is really what Angela Spencer is—certainly no one is less certain of their status than Archer is. That alone gives a vital clue about Archer’s character—he is almost as hapless (although not quite) as Pierre Bezuhov in War and Peace. He eventually falls in love with a young Irish woman who leads him on a merry chase.

Edward, Angela’s father, is the owner of the Majestic, and a fierce Unionist—adamantly opposed to any kind of autonomy for the Irish whom he despises. Angela makes a brief appearance only to disappear, leaving the Major as confused as ever about their status; shortly, Archer learns that she’s died of leukemia; he never knew she was sick in all their long correspondence during the war. Ripon, Edward’s son, is a ne’er-do-well who is totally disinterested in having anything to do with the Majestic. There are a group of little old ladies, retired, nearly destitute but soldiering on in the Majestic, more or less on Edward’s complaisance. Which, it should be said is more out of an inability to tend to any sort of real business than from compassion. The old women, in the end, turn out to have more courage and common sense than the totality of all the other English combined. There is an old and definitely crazy Irish butler who spends most of his time ducking out of work. Any sane person would, in the Majestic.

The hotel is falling apart, but Edward is incapable of making the decision necessary to repair and maintain the place. Some of the best scenes in the book are the consequences of this total lack of attention. The major has no sheets on his bed and isn’t able to either seek them out or have some one bring them for days. Pieces of the building fall off. In one hilarious section, roots from trees in the palm court invade the building and push up through the rotting floors, looking like blanched legs of corpses.

The deteriorating hotel, of course, is symbolic of the falling apart of British rule in southern Ireland, set against a picture of starving Irish, with women scrounging through dumpsters for anything resembling food to feed their families. Some of the descriptions of the plight of the Irish are harrowing. through it all, except for the Major, the English are pretty much indifferent or else feel that the Irish somehow deserve their fate by being an inferior race. You're not left in any doubt why the Irish, again and again, rebelled violently against British occupation and rule.

Through all this, Edward pursues his twin enthusiasms of irrelevant projects and damning the Irish. Major Archer who, at first is sympathetic towards the Irish, soon falls under Edward’s sway to the extent that he, too, appalled by the daily violence and rising toll of corpses, sides with the Unionists, at least for a while.

In what is really the climax of the story, Edward, in a burst of enthusiasm to restore the majestic to its former glory, holds a ball—which, of course, is a disaster, but a brilliantly described one. The book continues to a bizarre but fitting end.

The art of mockery is exactly that—an art. When overdone, it bores; underdone, and you’re left wondering what the point was and with annoyance with the author. I think that Farrell struck just the right balance, never overindulging, and presenting the story almost as a comedy of manners, only one with a tragic background and outcome. It’s an unusual, demanding, but truly outstanding read. ( )