Troubles by JG Farrell
Introduction by John Banville
INTRODUCTION
IN DEREK MAHON’S great poem A Disused Shed in Co.
Wexford, a pair of travelers find themselves “Deep in the
grounds of a burnt-out hotel, / Among the bathtubs and the
washbasins”; forcing open a long-locked door, they come
upon a host of mushrooms crowding in the darkness. They
have been there, the poet imagines, for decades, waiting for
the blessed light to break in upon their fetid, liminal world:
“Save us, save us,” they seem to say,
“Let not the god abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
The poem is a threnody for disappeared worlds—“Lost
people of Treblinka and Pompeii!”—especially, although it
does not mention it directly, the world of the Anglo-Irish
aristocracy. This hardy strain, which had endured for some
eight centuries, came to its sudden withering in the Irish War
of Independence, which ended with the treaty signed between
the British government and Michael Collins’s I.R.A. in 1922.
Under the treaty Ireland was partitioned, with twenty-six
southern counties becoming a Free State, and the six northern
counties remaining under British sovereignty. The result
was civil war.
Effectively the country had been portioned out between
the Protestants of the North and the Catholics of the South.
It seemed at the time, to the bellicose Collins no less than to
the British Prime Minister Lloyd George, the only possible
solution to an insoluble problem. One of the results of partition
was that in both the North and the South a religious minority
was left to fend for itself as best it might among a more
or less hostile majority. In the North, that fending continues
to this day; in the South, the Protestants, some 5 percent of
the population, largely withdrew from public life, a matter
of bitter regret to many of the more perceptive among them,
from W. B. Yeats—“We are no petty people!”—to Hubert
Butler. Butler, an essayist of genius, never ceased to bemoan
the loss to the life of Southern Ireland of that energy, intransigence,
and often fierce radicalism which marked the Protestant
tradition, especially in the North.
Mahon’s poem is dedicated to his friend J. G. Farrell. Farrell
was an elusive, intensely private man, something of an
enigma not only to the reading public but to many of those
who knew him well. His parentage was a mixture of Irish and
English. He was born in Liverpool in 1935, and spent much of
his youth in the Far East. In his first term at Oxford he was
afflicted with polio, which left him with a partially disabled
arm. Nevertheless he was extremely attractive—in looks he
resembled, and indeed had something of the aloofly playful
manner of, Marcel Duchamp—and had affairs with an impressive
number of women, as Lavinia Greacen revealed in
her 1999 biography. He wrote seven novels, the best-known
of which are the three which comprise the so-called Empire
Trilogy, The Siege of Krishnapur, The Singapore Grip, and
Troubles.
In the spring of 1979, Farrell moved to Ireland, living in
a cottage on a remote promontory in Bantry Bay. Four
months later, in August, while fishing in stormy weather off
rocks near the cottage, he was washed into the sea and
drowned. His death at forty-four, a tragically early age, especially
for a novelist, led to an inexplicable decline in his reputation.
Had he lived, no doubt he would have done wonders,
vi
Introduction
but even in the relatively short span of his career he erected
an enduring literary monument, the capstone of which is
Troubles. Although The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker
Prize in 1973, Troubles is surely his masterpiece, and the
book of his that is certain to endure.
The “Troubles” of the title is the euphemism which the
Irish—peasant, merchant, or Protestant aristo—applied to the
ragged, sporadic, but brutal war that began in 1919 between
Sinn Fein/I.R.A. and the British army of occupation. In fact,
that war might be said to have started three years earlier,
with the abortive Easter Rising of 1916, which lasted a week
and ended with the summary execution of fourteen of its
leaders. The uprising had been deeply unpopular among the
majority of the Irish people—legend has it that lady passersby
belabored with their umbrellas the rebel force as it entered
to occupy the General Post Office in Dublin on that Easter
Monday morning—and both the English and the Anglo-Irish
regarded it as a stab in the back by an ungrateful rabblement
at a time when thousands of young men, many of them
Irish, were dying in the defense of liberty in the killing fields
of France. However, the haste and brutality of the executions
of the leaders of the Rising provoked a surge of resentment
among the native population that would not be
asuaged until British rule was ended, at least in the TwentySix
Counties.
Although Troubles, first published in 1970, was set fifty
years previously, it was unintentionally well-timed, and uncannily
prescient. That year saw the onset in bloody earnest
of a new round of Troubles which at last, it is to be hoped, are
coming to an end. In 1970, as in 1920, battle was joined between
two mutually uncomprehending tribes; now, it was
between the Catholic and Protestant working classes of Northern
Ireland, with the British army in the middle; then,
between the Catholic peasantry and the Protestant Ascendancy,
with a force of British irregulars, the Black and Tans,
Introduction
vii
supposedly set to keep the peace but in reality waging punitive
retaliation against an elusive army of rebels.
In Troubles, Farrell catches with appalling accuracy the
brutal yet peculiarly farcical nature of that war that was
never quite a war. Nowhere in the book do we see a single
live I.R.A. man; even when one of the central characters,
Major Archer, is being buried up to his neck on a beach to
await drowning by the incoming tide, the hands that dig the
hole and place him in it are anonymous, and might from the
description of their ministrations be in the act of saving him
rather than attempting to murder him. When we do get a
glimpse of a rebel, a dead one, it is in one of the novel’s more
gruesomely comic, closing scenes—the body of the young
man has been laid out on a table in a gun room, where his executioner,
Edward Spencer, lets his gaze wander around the
trophies of wild animal heads on the paneled walls, and “for
an instant the dreadful thought occurred to the Major that
Edward had now gone completely insane and was looking
for a place on the wall to mount the Sinn Feiner.”
Edward Spencer—a name that will have an allusive echo
for anyone who knows the history of Elizabethan Ireland—
is one of the great comic portraits in modern literature. He
is the proprietor, if that is the word, of the Majestic Hotel,
a crumbling pile somewhere on the coast of County Wexford.
It is to the Majestic that the haunted war veteran Major
Archer comes, with wan reluctance, to claim Edward’s daughter
Angela as his bride. But Angela will not be wed, and as
the weeks become months, and the months years, the Major
lingers, an only faintly more vivid ghost among the hotel’s
ghostly guests, ancient ladies, for the most part, who have
taken up permanent residence under the tottering former
magnificence of the Majestic, along with a steadily burgeoning
pack of half-wild cats which roam the upper stories like
the building’s bad dreams. Meanwhile Edward’s surviving
daughters, the terrible twins Faith and Charity—another Introduction
wonderful, and curiously erotic, invention—are growing halfwild
too, the staff and servants lurk like wood-sprites, the
boy Padraig is turning transvestite, and Murphy the majordomo
is going quietly but dangerously mad.
This may all sound like the cod-Gothic of Cold Comfort
Farm or the deliciously cruel absurdities of early Evelyn
Waugh, but Farrell’s vision and voice are unique, inimitable.
If there are faint echoes here, they are the most finely harmonious:
Elizabeth Bowen’s masterpiece, The Last September,
perhaps Henry Green’s hypnotic Loving. The tone of Troubles
throughout is one of vague, helpless desperation, while the
wit is dry to the point of snapping. Since the bulk of the action
is seen through the Major’s war-damaged sensibility,
there is an air of permanent, pallid bafflement before the
mundane mysteries of Irish life.
Yet the book is horridly, irresistibly, achingly funny, even,
or especially, when it is at its most violent, or most poignant.
The Major’s doomed love for Sarah, the dissatisfied daughter
of a—Catholic—banker in the nearby town of Kilnalough is
at once heartbreaking and comic. Farrell’s touch is robust yet
delicate, and always sure. In the midst of a masterly set piece
describing a ball at the Majestic which is meant to be grand
but turns out grisly, there is a fleeting moment of exquisite
sorrow when Sarah, bored with the Major’s mutely pleading
presence at her side, drops her eyes to her glass: “She flicked
it idly with her finger-nail and drew from it one thin, clear
note of a painful beauty, over which the honeyed sighings of
the violins on the platform had no dominion.”
If Troubles is the expression of the end of a world, it is one
of the most finely modulated and magically comic whimpers
the reader is ever likely to catch.
— J OHN BANVILLE
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