Troubles (Farrell)

Troubles
J.G. Farrell, 1970
New York Review of Books
459 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781590170182

Summary
Winner, 2010 Lost Booker Prize

1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancee is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline.

The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin.

As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of "the troubles." (From the publisher.)

This is the first book in Farrell's Empire Trilogy; the second is The Siege of Krishnapur (1970) and the third is The Singapore Grip (1978).

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Author Bio
• Birth—January 25, 1935
• Where—Liverpool, England, UK
• Death—August 11, 1979
• Where—Bantry Bay, County Cork, Ireland
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Booker Prize; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Lost Man Booker Prize


James Gordon Farrell was a Liverpool-born novelist of Irish descent. He gained prominence for a series of novels known as the Empire Trilogy (Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip), which deal with the political and human consequences of British colonial rule.

Farrell's career abruptly ended when he drowned in Ireland at the age of 44, swept to his death in a storm. "Had he not sadly died so young,” Salman Rushdie said in 2008, "there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary."

Troubles received the 1971 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and The Siege of Krishnapur received the 1973 Booker Prize. In 2010 Troubles was retrospectively awarded the Lost Man Booker Prize, created to recognise works published in 1970. Troubles and its fellow shortlisted works had not been open for consideration that year due to a change in the eligibility rules.

Early life and education
Farrell, born in Liverpool into a family of Anglo-Irish background, was the second of three sons. His father, William Farrell, had worked as an accountant in Bengal, and in 1929 he married Prudence Josephine Russell, a former receptionist and secretary to a doctor. From the age of 12 he attended Rossall public school in Lancashire.

After World War II, the Farrells moved to Dublin, and from this point on Farrell spent much time in Ireland: this, perhaps combined with the popularity of Troubles, leads many to treat him as an Irish writer. After leaving Rossall, he taught in Dublin and also worked for some time on Distant Early Warning Line in the Canadian Arctic.

In 1956, he went to study at Brasenose College, Oxford; while there he contracted polio. This would leave him partially crippled, and the disease would be prominent in his works. In 1960 he left Oxford with Third-class honours in French and Spanish and went to live in France, where he taught at a lycee.

Early works
Farrell published his first novel, A Man From Elsewhere, in 1963. Set in France, it shows the clear influence of French existentialism. The story follows Sayer, who is a journalist for a communist paper, as he tries to find skeletons in Regan's closet. Regan is a dying novelist who is about to be awarded an important Catholic literary prize. The book mimics the fight between the two leaders of French existentialism: Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The two argue about existentialism: the position that murder can be vindicated as an expedient in overthrowing tyranny (Sartre) versus the stance that there are no ends that justify unjust means (Camus). Bernard Bergonzi reviewed it in the New Statesman in the 20 September 1963 issue and said, "Many first novels are excessively autobiographical, but A Man from Elsewhere suffers from the opposite fault of being a cerebral construct, dreamed up out of literature and the contemporary French cinema." Farrell himself came to dislike the book.

Two years after this came The Lung, in which Farrell returned to his real-life trauma of less than a decade earlier: the main character Martin Sands contracts polio and has to spend a long period in hospital. It has been noted that it is somewhat modelled after Farrell, but it is modelled more after Geoffrey Firmin from Malcolm Lowry 1947 novel, Under the Volcano. The anonymous reviewer for The Observer wrote that "Mr. Farrell gives the pleasantly solid impression of really having something to write about" and one for The Times Literary Supplement that "Mr. Farrell's is an effective, potent brew, compounded of desperation and a certain wild hilarity."

In 1967, he published A Girl in the Head. The protagonist, the impoverished Polish count Boris Slattery, lives in the fictional English seaside town of Maidenhair Bay, in the house of the Dongeon family (which is believed to be modeled after V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas). His marriage to Flower Dongeon is decaying. His companion is Dr. Cohen, who is a dying alcoholic. Boris also has sex with an underaged teenager, June Furlough. He also fantasizes about Ines, a Swedish summer guest, who is the "girl in the head." Boris is believed to be modeled after Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Like its two predecessors, the book met only middling critical and public reaction.

Empire Trilogy
Troubles (1970) tells the comic yet melancholy tale of an English Major, Brendan Archer, who in 1919 goes to County Wexford in Ireland to meet the woman he believes he may be engaged to marry. From the crumbling Majestic Hotel at Kilnalough, he watches Ireland's fight for independence from Britain. Farrell started writing this book while on a Harkness Fellowship in the United States and finished it in a tiny flat in Knightsbridge, London. He won a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for the novel, and with the prize money travelled to India to research his next novel.

Farrell's next book The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and his last completed work The Singapore Grip (1978) both continue his story of the collapse of British colonial power. The former deals with the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Inspired by historical events such as the sieges of Cawnpore and Lucknow, the novel is set in the fictional town of Krishnapur, where a besieged British garrison succeeds in holding out for four months against an army of native sepoys, in the face of enormous suffering, before being relieved.

The third of the novels, The Singapore Grip, centres upon the Japanese capture of the British colonial city of Singapore in 1942, while also exploring at some length the economics and ethics of colonialism at the time, as well as the economic relationship between developed and Third World countries at the time that Farrell was writing.

The three novels are in general linked only thematically, although Archer, a character in Troubles, reappears in The Singapore Grip. The protagonist of Farrell's unfinished novel, The Hill Station, is Dr McNab, introduced in The Siege of Krishnapur; this novel and its accompanying notes make the series a quartet.

When The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker Prize in 1973, Farrell used his acceptance speech to attack the sponsors, the Booker Group, for their business involvement in the agricultural sector in the Third World. In this vein, some readers have found Farrell's critique of colonialism and capitalism in his subsequent novel The Singapore Grip to be heavy-handed, although those new to the book after the crash of 2008 might not find it so.

Death
In 1979, Farrell decided to quit London to take up residence on the Sheep's Head peninsula in southwestern Ireland. A few months later he was found drowned on the coast of Bantry Bay, after falling in from rocks while angling. He was 44.

He is buried in the cemetery of St. James's Church of Ireland in Durrus. The manuscript library at Trinity College, Dublin holds his papers: Papers of James Gordon Farrell (1935–1979). TCD MSS 9128-60.

Legacy
Ronald Binns described Farrell's colonial novels as "probably the most ambitious literary project conceived and executed by any British novelist in the 1970s."

In the 1984 novel Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, Vinnie Miner, the protagonist, reads a Farrell novel on her flight from New York to London. In the 1991 novel The Gates of Ivory by Margaret Drabble, the writer Stephen Cox is modelled on Farrell.

Charles Sturridge scripted a film version of Troubles made for British television in 1988 and directed by Christopher Morahan.

Quotes
Farrell said to George Brock in an interview for The Observer Magazine, "the really interesting thing that's happened during my lifetime has been the decline of the British Empire." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/12/2015.)

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Book Reviews
Remarkable.... Mr. Farrell deserves high praise for this novel. It is subtly modulated, richly textured, sad, funny, and altogether memorable.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)

Farrell wrote superbly; all his books had a quality that hallmarks great literary talent—he could “do” texture. This album—which is what Troubles feels like—records the same Anglo-Irish as Elizabeth Bowen knew and belonged to. As with Bowen, this feels like the real thing (which is all a novel has to do). Always judge a writer by his grasp of what he doesn’t know: Farrell died young yet his old people are almost his best creations.
Frank Delaney - The Guardian (UK)

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Troubles:

1. Why does Edward Spencer want his tenants to sign the loyalty oath to the King? Why do the tenants refuse?

2. Why does Farrell use the hotel as the setting for his novel? What is the irony behind the name of the hotel...and in what way does it serve as a metaphor?

3. What is the cause of the hotel's increasing dilapidation...and why do its residents remain? As Farrell's descriptions of the hotel began to pile up, one after the other, does it elicit in you a sense of claustrophobia?

4. One reviewer says that the "decrepitude of the Majestic offers Farrell unlimited opportunities to indulge his formidable gifts of description and wry humor." Take a few moments to pick out some passages that demonstrate those descriptive and humorous gifts. How about the Palm Court...or the Imperial Bar? The peacocks...or cats? Or the Major switching from one room to another?

5. What about Angela Spencer, Major Archer's fiancee? What do you think of her? And how 'bout that Sarah Devlin? Discuss thoroughly...and defend your answer!

6. What attitude do the Protestants take vis-a-vis Sinn Fein and the killings? How do those in the hotel view the Irish people in general?

7. What is the significance of the shooting of the Majestic's cats...and Edward's shooting his beloved dog? What do the shootings foreshadow?

8. What do you come to learn about the effects of the 1916 Easter Rebellion and disturbances at the Peace Day Parade in Dublin? Do those events and others justify the actions of Sinn Fein? Or do the actions of Sinn Fein simply encourage reprisals on the part of the British? Can revenge killing be justified—on either side?

9. Farrell incorporates news stories into his novel. What is their purpose...what do they convey? Did you enjoy the tecnhique...or find it disruptive to the flow of the narrative?

10. How does Farrell's work present colonialism. Is his presentation fair...or biased? Were the effects of colonialism always negative; were there ever benefits?

11. As a writer does Farrell create sympathy with one side of the Irish conflict over the other? Or does he portray both sides in a compassionate, although perhaps satiric (even absurd), manner. Did you find yourself sympathsizing with the Anglo-aristocracy driven out of their homes, as well as with the oppressed Irish people?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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