Troubles
Troubles
by J. G. Farrell
THE LITERARY WORK
A novel set in Ireland between 1919 and 1921; published in 1970.
SYNOPSIS
A First World War veteran travels from London to the south oí Ireland to stay with his fiancée in the crumbling Majestic Hotel during the last days of British rule.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written
Troubles is the first part of the “Empire Trilogy,” a series of novels by J. G. Farrell published in the 1970s depicting moments of crisis and decline in the history of the British Empire. Prior to Troubles, Farrell was a relatively unknown novelist who had achieved only moderate success. He was born on January 25, 1935, in Liverpool to an English father and Irish mother, and spent his childhood years in both England and Ireland. His Anglo-Irish heritage would prove to be an important influence in his writing. An athletic and confident youth who excelled at sports, in October 1956, Farrell went up to Brasenose College, Oxford University, to study law. But within weeks of his arrival he was seriously ill, struck down with the crippling disease of polio. He spent many weeks paralyzed in an iron lung, and although he would recover, the polio left his body irreparably damaged; he permanently lost some mobility, especially in his upper half. Not surprisingly perhaps, his early novels combined a sense of existential bleakness with a subtly redemptive, if often bizarre, sense of humor. His style (and fortunes) changed considerably, however, when he turned to historical matters in his Empire Trilogy novels. The first in the series, Troubles (1970), concerns the end of British rule in Ireland. The second, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), focuses on the so-called Indian “mutiny” of 1857. Third and longest, The Singapore Grip (1978) examines the fall of Singapore to Japanese forces in 1942. In the year after its publication, Farrell moved to Ireland and bought a cottage on the coast. On Saturday, August 11, 1979, while fishing on some rocks, the 44-year-old Farrell was washed out to sea in a freak storm and drowned. At the time of his death, he left an unfinished seventh novel, The Hill Station, published in 1981. It is, however, for his masterpiece, Troubles, that he is best remembered. In it, Farrell managed to bring together the melancholy, absurdist vision of his earlier writing with a well-researched, unsympathetic view of British colonial history in a way that greatly influenced later novelists keen to treat the violence and injustices of British colonialism.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
Nationalism, “Home Rule” and the Irish Free State
Troubles begins with the arrival of its central character, Major Brendan Archer, at the Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough, Ireland, in the summer of 1919. It ends with his departure in the late summer of 1921. The years bracketed by these dates contained some of the most traumatic and bloody events in twentieth-century Irish history, as British rule came to an end for the 26th of its 32 counties with the declaration of the Irish Free State in December 1921. Although “the Troubles” is more often used to refer to the political situation in the north of Ireland after 1968, it has also been used in rektion to the years 1919-1921—hence the title of Farrell’s novel.
During the nineteenth century, there had been various attempts to challenge the Act of Union (1800) between England and Ireland that had abolished the Irish Parliament and made the country subservient to government from Westminster, England. Toward the end of the century, Charles Stuart Pamell had galvanized the predominantly poor Catholic population of Ireland into a nationalist movement and, during the 1880s, negotiated with England’s Prime Minister, William Gladstone, for a form of Irish “Home Rule” that would return limited domestic powers to the country. Home Rule was an alarming prospect for the affluent Irish Protestant population, which constituted a minority throughout the island as a whole but a significant majority in the six counties of the north of Ireland collectively known as “Ulster.” As successive British governments attempted to introduce Home Rule in the early years of the twentieth century, they met with increasing hostility from the Ulster Protestants, who were committed to the maintenance of the Union with England. The Home Rule proponents likewise clashed with frustrated Catholic Irish nationalists who felt that the measure did not go far enough; instead they demanded the establishment of an Irish Republic completely free from British influence. On Easter Monday, 1916, a nationalist insurrection occurred on the streets of Dublin. British soldiers were attacked by nationalist troops, and a statement declaring the creation of a provisional Irish Republic was read from the steps of the General Post Office on Sackville Street. Within days the insurrection had been defeated. In the following weeks its leaders were executed, creating a public outcry; the memory of Easter 1916 and the fate of its leaders would act as a powerful emotive force in the years leading up to independence.
By 1919 armed nationalist forces—originally referred to as the “Volunteers” but gradually known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA)—had begun taking action under the leadership of Michael Collins. His group and others began a series of guerrilla attacks on police and military targets (and on Irish Catholics deemed “traitors” to the nation), with the aim of bringing Ireland to its knees. The violence began in January with the murder of two constables of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) by the “Volunteers” Dan Breen and Sean Treacy (the event is recorded near the beginning of Troubles). As these attacks increased, brutal reprisals by the RIC became common occurrences, often involving the burning of houses and attacks on Irish men and women. In response to the escalating violence from 1919 into 1920, the British government sent two forms of reinforcements to Ireland to support the RIC. Rather than restoring British law and order, each form seemed to make the situation worse. The first, the Black and Tans, arrived in March 1920 and soon attracted a reputation for bloody retaliation and violence against the insurgent Catholic Irish. The second, the Auxiliaries, arrived in July of that year and also established a reputation for aggression (a detachment of Auxiliaries stays at the Majestic Hotel in Troubles). For example, in September 1920 the Auxiliaries burned and sacked the city center of Cork after the IRA destroyed RIC barracks in the area. In July 1921, the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, increasingly alarmed at the escalating bloodshed and chaos in Ireland, invited Irish nationalist leaders to London. On December 6, 1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed, giving 26 of the Irish counties autonomy over their own affairs as the Irish Free State, but retaining the six Protestant-majority counties in the north as part of the Union. However, this effective partition of the country, as well as the controversial aspects of the treaty (ministers of the new Irish Free State still had to take an oath of allegiance to the British crown), created a set of problems that led to the Irish Civil War of 1922-23 and would remain very much a part of Irish politics through the twentieth century.
Nationalist resistance throughout the Empire
By 1919 the British Empire was at its zenith. In addition to Ireland, its colonial possessions included much of South Asia, numerous lands in Africa; the Middle Eastern territories; and a variety of Caribbean islands; as well as the Dominions of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. The defeat of Germany in the First World War meant that German colonies—including Cameroon, Togo and Tanganyika—also became British Mandates. By 1919 the British Empire had become one of the largest empires the world had ever seen.
Ostensibly Britain seemed to occupy a position of imperial force. However, this impression masked incidents of continual opposition and resistance to British rule throughout the colonies, often by nationalist forces in colonized lands. At the turn of the century, these challenges found strong expression in the Empire’s “settler” colonies: those countries in the American and Australasian continents featuring large populations descended from European settlers. The settler colonies agitated for forms of self-government achieved when they became “Dominions” of the British Empire, self-governing states that pledged an allegiance to the British Crown. Canada was the first to receive Dominion status in 1867; Australia followed in 1900, New Zealand in 1907, South Africa in 1909. Additionally, during the early decades of the twentieth century, a variety of pressure groups were formed throughout the colonies in order to give focus to anticolonial and nationalist energies, especially in Africa and Asia. For example, the South African National Native Congress (later the African Congress) originated in 1914, while in 1921 Mohandas Gandhi began the Non-Cooperation movement in India. This momentum against the rule of empire would grow steadily, culminating for many colonies in the achievement of independence after the Second World War (1939-1945).
During the early decades of the century, resistance movements often met with brutality at the hands of the British. To choose just one example, on April 13, 1919, at the Jallianwallagh (a public park) in Amritsar, India, a crowd of peaceful demonstrators were gunned down by Indian Army troops led by Brigadier-General R. E. H. Dyer. In Troubles the Major reads about the Amritsar Massacre in the newspaper at the Majestic Hotel, and on several other occasions news reaches Ireland of anticolonial unrest in South Africa, India, and elsewhere. Indeed, one of Troubles’s most important characteristics is its careful linking of the anti-British violence in Ireland with those anticolonial struggles overseas that to some degree influenced and encouraged Irish nationalism—which, in turn, were subsequently affected by events in Ireland. Although produced by a unique history and specific to Ireland, Irish nationalist resistance was in fact linked to these wider, transnational forms of resistance against empire that surfaced in countries throughout the world.
Protestantism and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy
For centuries Ireland has been riven by tensions between two communities, Cathohcs and Protestants. While Irish Catholics have been in the majority throughout the island, they have constituted the peasant and working classes, historically remote from power and authority. Contrarily, from the late seventeenth century until the War of Independence (1919-21) Protestants comprised a rich and powerful landowning elite more centrally involved in Irish politics and the economy. The reasons behind this divide, and the consequent tensions between the two communities, lie in a long and complex Irish history.
Elizabeth I’s conquest of Ireland in the latter part of the sixteenth century established English government in a Gaelic, predominantly Catholic country that, significantly, had remained unaffected by the Protestant Reformation in Renaissance Europe. Elizabeth met with resistance from Gaelic chiefs and lords, the most famous being the Earl of Tyrone’s stand against Elizabethan rule in Ulster in 1598. But by 1601 Tyrone had been defeated. He received a royal pardon for his treason, but in 1607 fled the country. His lands in Ulster were forfeited to the British Crown, and in 1610 there began the “Plantation of Ulster.” English and Scottish Protestants settled in the north in an attempt to stabilize the volatile relations between Ireland and the rest of the British isles. These settlers, and those bom to them, were fiercely proud of their Protestant identity and traditions and deeply suspicious of the Catholic Irish, who became their tenants or laborers. Tensions between the two faiths were inevitable. In 1641 there occurred a bloody uprising of Catholic Irish in an attempt to recover the lands lost to the settlers, in which Protestants were slaughtered. Eight years later the anti-Catholic Oliver Cromwell, fresh from his victories in the English civil war, arrived in Ireland to fight both those troops stationed there loyal to England’s King Charles II and the Irish Catholics. Catholics were given little mercy in the violence that ensued; any lands remaining in Catholic hands were seized and redistributed. Robert Kee estimates that the percentage of land owned by Catholics was 59 percent in 1641, 22 percent in 1649, 14 percent in 1659 and 7 percent in 1714 (Kee, p. 48). Both Cromwell’s ruthlessness in reasserting the authority of Protestantism in Ireland, and the Catholic Uprising of 1641, remain emotive memories for Ireland’s divided communities to this day.
Protestant power in Ireland was clinched in the late seventeenth century. Concerned by the crowning of the Catholic James II in England, who seemed willing to restore lands to Irish Catholics, Irish Protestants again began to fear for their safety. When news arrived in 1688 in Londonderry, Ulster, that Catholics were murdering Protestants as a response to the news from England that James 11 was being succeeded by a new king, the Protestant William of Orange, Londonderry’s citizens refused to admit a Catholic garrison of the King’s troops. Soon both James II and William of Orange were fighting each other in Ireland. William completely defeated the King’s Catholic forces in 1691. As Robert Kee puts it, “This was the foundation of that triumph of Protestant over Catholic, Orange over Green, still perpetuated in memory by Protestants in Northern Ireland” (Kee, p. 50).
The eighteenth century saw the establishment of a Protestant landowning class, often called the “Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.” This is an odd name, perhaps, as many of the Protestant landowning families had been settled in Ireland for generations and knew very little of England. However, the term “Anglo-Irish” emphasizes the fact that the Ascendancy remained firmly Protestant and treasured its close religious and political affiliations with Britain. The thought of Irish independence was anathema to the Ascendancy, which feared an Ireland ruled by Catholics beyond the jurisdiction of the British state. Although suffering a decline in the nineteenth century, the Ascendancy held considerable influence at the time of the War of Independence, especially in Ulster, although its power was indeed waning as Catholic Irish nationalism gained momentum. It is into the early twentieth-century world of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in decline that Farrell takes us in Troubles.
The Novel in Focus
Plot summary
Troubles consists of two parts of equal length (like the country it depicts, it has been divided into two). In the first, “A Member of the Quality,” Major Brendan Archer arrives at the illustrious Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough, a fictional Irish village on the east coast of Ireland, to meet up with his fiancée, Angela Spencer, to whom he became rashly engaged in Brighton while on leave in 1916. Angela is the eldest daughter of Edward Spencer, who purchased the Majestic Hotel on his return from India some years earlier. Although Edward is not of the Irish landowning Protestant Ascendancy, the so-called “Quality,” his wealth and power aligns him with them while pointing to the continued collusion between the Protestant Irish and the English. Like the Irish Protestants, he too fears and distrusts the Catholic Irish.
The Majestic has fallen into disrepair and retains only a shadow of its former glory as an exclusive and fashionable establishment for members of the “Quality.” The Major has read all about the Majestic and the Spencers in Angela’s letters, yet on his arrival he is disconcerted to find that both the hotel and the family are not at all what he imagined. Inhabited mainly by old ladies and administered by a skeleton staff of local Irish characters, including the mysterious Irish servant Murphy, the Majestic is a vast, rambling building, full of hidden passageways and staircases. Litters of cats can be found gamboling in the deserted rooms. The hotel features crumbling masonry, and the Palm Court is filled with comically overgrown foliage.
The Major meets Angela’s family—her father Edward, her brother Ripon, and her twin sisters Faith and Charity (her mother died some years previously). Gradually he is drawn into the bizarre day-to-day rhythm of life at the hotel. Angela herself proves elusive. She rarely appears at meals, and mysteriously disappears from the Major’s view altogether. Soon he meets other key figures in Kilnalough, including Sarah Devlin, an outspoken Irish Catholic girl occasionally confined to a wheelchair due to an unspecified illness. Within a few weeks the Major has decided that his engagement to the mysterious Angela is a bad idea and decides to leave the Majestic. He travels to Dublin to see the Peace Day parade on July 19, 1919, and, while there, he witnesses the gunning down of an Irish Volunteer who had just assassinated a retired British Army Officer working at Dublin Castle. Disconcerted and baffled by the escalating violence around him, the Major decides to quit Ireland immediately. But a telegram arrives to tell him that Angela has died from leukemia, and the Major makes his way back to the Majestic in a melancholy frame of mind.
After the funeral, at the end of the summer, the Major returns to London but stays in touch with Sarah Devlin, who visits him some weeks later. Throughout the next few months he develops a burgeoning love for Sarah, which draws him back to Kilnalough in May 1920. The Majestic seems in a greater state of disrepair than ever. A sinister warning has been erected at the entrance to the hotel by the IRA telling of the dire consequences for those abetting “traitors” to Ireland; the Major soon learns that a group of Auxiliaries are staying in the hotel. One morning the Major notices that the starving Kilnalough villagers have begun to steal corn from Edward Spencer’s fields. This is because Edward is in dispute with the villagers about their access to the land—from which, no doubt, they derive their only source of income—and has forbidden them to reap their usual harvest. During the night, he is woken up to witness the com fields blazing, an action that Edward suspects is the doing of the IRA, keen to turn the Kilnalough villagers’ opinion against him by spreading the word that the fire was Edward’s doing. Very gradually, the Major detects the violence and hostility he witnessed in Dublin making its presence felt in the daily lives of those in Kilnalough.
In Part Two of the novel, the violence at large in Ireland exerts greater impact on Kilnalough, causing Edward Spencer to become more defensive and hostile towards the Irish. Living absurdly amidst the old ladies at the Majestic and spending his days wandering the hotel or playing cards, the Major attempts to pursue his relationship with Sarah, but her capricious behavior frequently frustrates his intentions and he becomes suspicious of her growing intimacy with Edward. Meanwhile, the Majestic gradually grows more decrepit. In one particularly ironic episode, the capita! “M” of the hotel’s name, which hangs on its exterior wall, detaches itself and falls to the ground, leaving the moniker “ajestic” in its place (the hotel has literally become “a jest”). Fueled by their rivalry for Sarah, the Major and Edward begin to argue; the Major objects to the colonial, racist attitude typical of the Ascendancy that Edward takes towards the Catholic Irish, (who are, incidentally, spotted daily foraging desperately amongst the hotel’s bins for scraps of food to eat). By Christmas 1920 the atmosphere at large in the country has become increasingly tense, and there is a palpable sense of the community at the Majestic living in a state of siege (revolvers are laid on the dinner table, along with knives and forks). Madly perhaps, Edward decides to throw a party. A ball at the Majestic, he thinks, may restore some splendor and grandeur to the establishment and to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy it represents.
FROM THE TIMES, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1920 “DISTRICT INSPECTOR MURDERED”
“A police officer was killed yesterday evening in a lonely part of Co. Sligo and two policemen who were with him were wounded. An official report of the outrage, which was received in Dublin to-day, states that a motor police patrol was ambushed al half past 5 between Bminanadclen and Tubbercurry. District-inspector Brady was shot dead and Constable O’Hara was seriously wounded. Constable Browne was also wounded in the head. . . .
Following the shooting of District-inspector Brady, lhe town of Tubbercirry was visited by armed men in lorries during the night and many houses were wrecked. The firing of rifles and the bursting of bombs terrified the inhabitants, several of whom fled to the fields. Afterwards the party drove into the country, and this morning the Ballyara and Achonry creameries were found have been burned.”
(Times, p. 10)
The ball is attended by many of the “Quality,” but it serves only to underline their declining fortunes in the Ireland of 1921. Disrupted by the hooligan behavior of the Auxiliaries and the mysterious disappearance of Edward Spencer at its height, it is also an evening of failed hopes for the Major. Sarah refuses his offer of marriage, and the Major soon discovers evidence of a sordid liaison between Sarah and Edward. She disappears with a brutal British soldier, Captain Bolton, during the night. After the failure of the ball, the Major realizes that the Majestic’s days are numbered, a fact exacerbated by the shooting of an Irishman by Edward, who had suspected the Irishman to be a member of the IRA. Fearful of reprisals the Major convinces Edward to leave the Majestic and put the hotel up for sale. Next, he persuades the old ladies that they too must leave for their own safety and sees them safely onto a train leaving Kilnalough. In the novel’s closing pages he is left alone at the Majestic to greet the arrival of an RIC officer concerning Edward’s killing of the IRA suspect.
During the visit, the RIC officer and the Major are attacked, buried up to their necks in sand on the Kilnalough shore and left to drown. In a scene typical of Farrell’s ability to combine pathos with the bizarre, the Major is rescued by the old ladies, whose scheduled train has been canceled, forcing them to return to the hotel. Meanwhile, Edward’s Irish servant, Murphy, gleefully burns the Majestic to the ground. The novel ends with news of the Major’s recovery from his ordeal and departure for London in autumn 1921; still troubled by thoughts of Sarah, he has rescued the statue of Venus from the entrance hall of the ruined Majestic to take home with him.
The problem of writing history
After witnessing the killing of the Volunteer in Dublin, the Major reads about the incident in the newspaper the following day. He reflects upon the difference he notices between his experience of the incident and the subsequent reporting of it as a significant historical event, which converts a senseless act of violence into something portrayed as “normal and inevitable” (Farrell, Troubles, p. 102). This leads him to consider the amount of everyday life that historical representations leave out: “A raid on the barracks, the murder of a policeman in a lonely country road, an airship crossing the Atlantic, a speech by a man on a platform, or any other random acts, mostly violent, that one reads about every day: this was the history of the time. The rest was the mere ‘being alive’ that every age has to do” (Troubles, p. 102).
In its self-consciousness concerning the problem of narrating history, Troubles is typical of a more general “crisis in historicity” that pervaded the late 1960s in literature, philosophy, and history itself. Intellectuals such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault in France were arguing that history should not be thought of as a reliable witness of the past; rather, history was merely one more discourse among others, and there was essentially no significant difference between historical writing and imaginative writing. To this way of thinking, historical documents were compromised by the views and prejudices of those who both produced and read them. The documents left out of the picture more things than were recorded, and thus any historical narrative could be only a partial, limited view of a vanished era. In time this line of thinking would earn the name “postmodernism”; postmodernist thought declared the relativity of all points of view and cast doubt on the ability of language to reflect accurately the past and the present. These ideas exerted great impact on British and American literary culture in the late 196Os, as a growing number of writers began to produce novels where the practice of representing the past became profoundly problematic. The most famous example is perhaps John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969; also in WLAÏT 4: Brìtish and Irish Literature and Its Times), a tale of mid-Victorian England in which the narrator frequently interrupts the story to share with readers the difficulties that he is having in trying to give an accurate picture of life at the time, and doubts his, and his readers’, ability to discover any truth about the past. Although less overtly worried about its representation of history, Troubles is similarly preoccupied with how best to bear witness to the past.
Farrell believed that historical experience was not to be found in the official records and grand narratives of the historian, but in the day-to-day, seemingly incidental and insignificant details of life. In contrast to the conventional historian’s craft, Farrels focus is on the microcosmic, the particular, the curious. In his view, history is not “composed of treaties being signed or pincer movements. It’s smoke in your eyes or having a blister on your foot” (Farrell in Binns, p. 21). Significantly, Troubles is punctuated by extracts from newspaper reports (it is not resolved if these are real extracts from 1919-21 or invented by Farrell). The reports record the gradually worsening situation in Ireland, and bring news of other conflicts throughout Europe and the British Empire. Yet the bulk of the novel’s action is set at a slight angle to these historical events, which, for much of the novel, seem to have only an incidental impact on life at the Majestic. Significantly the novel’s setting is not Dublin, the capital of the nation, but rather a seemingly minor coastal village in Ireland. This is not a story of great leaders or heroes in the vanguard of history. Instead, its focus is on the “being alive” that every age does. The characters are minor, marginal participants at an important moment in history over which they have no overall control. The Major, a veteran of the First World War, has already experienced life undergoing history, has already followed orders from those directing the course of the war, and has already witnessed the suffering and bloodshed of the trenches (these experiences are responsible for the frequently melancholy moods that characterize him in the novel). It is a typical Farrell witticism that the name most frequently used for him, the Major, is ironic. In fact, the Major relinquished his military commission after completing his service in the British army; he is a Major in name only and not in any more meaningful sense.
In a similar fashion, the events depicted in Troubles both are and are not major. Although hostilities throughout the country are always on the edge of the reader’s vision, most of the action concerns seemingly trivial incidents. Yet it is clear that there is a definite historical relationship between seemingly unconnected “major” and “minor” events. The most innocuous and bizarre occurrences are just as much a result of the war of independence as are grander events. For example, Edward’s son, Ripon, falls in love with Maire Noonan, the daughter of a prominent Irish Catholic. Their relationship is a controversial one within each family as it crosses the borders of religion and nationality. In the interests of decency, Mr. Noonan decides to meet Edward at the Majestic. On his arrival, Edward, who is digging in the garden, mistakes Noonan for a rather insolent elderly telegraph boy and sends him up to the house, while Noonan takes Edward to be the gardener. Soon both men are wandering through the Majestic looking for each other, each thinking of the political and religious troubles that are, indirectly, responsible for their absurd wanderings through the labyrinthine Majestic on this particular day. In the seemingly un-sensational incident of two elderly fathers wandering aimlessly through the hotel, merely “being alive,” the novel suggests many of the “major” events directing their lives: the prejudices of Catholics and Protestants that add to their mutual misrecognition of each other; the historical situation that makes Edward wish to close ranks and not admit an Irish Catholic into his family; the failure of those on opposite sides of the divide in Ireland to meet on common ground. Indeed, the mundane incident of two men branching off in different directions in the Majestic, fated never to meet amicably, acts as a vivid and novel representation of the troubled situation in Ireland as a whole. Troubles invites readers to speculate that the true significance of history is best discovered in such microcosmic and bizarre consequences. In so doing, it makes its own contribution to debates at the time concerning the crisis of historicity.
Sources and literary context
Farrell’s influences were various, and he drew from several different sources throughout his career. His favorite writers included Joseph Conrad, Richard Hughes and Malcolm Lowry. He was particularly taken by Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano (1947); Chris Ackerley has written at length on the influence of Lowry in Farrell’s writing (see Ackerley in Crane, pp. 19-35). Farrell’s first three novels
THE DISINTEGRATING EMPIRE: TRAGEDY OR FARCE?
As John Spurling has noted, “From a seat in the gods the British in their short-lived Empire—in Ireland, in India or Malaya at those particular moments of disintegration—look tragic; but when you get down amongst them, the thing is a farce” (Spurling, p. 165). In depicting the end of British rule in Ireland, Farrell’s fiction is by no means nostalgic or elegiac for the vanishing empire. Indeed, the variety of tone in the novel is one of its greatest triumphs. Through the character of the Major, the war veteran, we are never allowed to forget that bloody conflict exacts a morbid price. But existing alongside such melancholy is a highly comic atmosphere that delights in indulging black and bizarre humor, often created through Farrell’s penchant for the unexpected metaphor. For example, at Angela’s funeral the Major glances down into her grave and sees a “neat oblong trench along the sides of which the white knuckles of roots showed like nuts in a slice of fruit cake” (Troubles, p. 105). A mixture of black humor and the bizarre contributes to the depiction of Edward and the Anglo-Irish “Quality” as farcical buffoons left increasingly moribund by historical events—remnants of an older, terminal world who are rapidly being turned into oddities and anachronisms in the historical present of 1919-1921. In the latter part of the novel, Edward takes to conducting a series of bizarre scientific experiments, one of which involves him firing a shotgun at his servant Murphy in order to measure the reduction of saliva in the human mouth when frightened. But his experiments only point up the increasing meaninglessness of Edward’s life, and the extent to which the history he is undergoing is rapidly leaving him as well as the rest of the “Quality” washed up and abandoned in its wake.
were influenced by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and French existentialism, and the Empire Trilogy bears the traces of their absurdist view of human life as temporary and meaningless. In addition, Farrell admitted owing much to Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and French writer Stendhal, who served as good examples of writers attempting to depict the experience of “undergoing history” (Binns, p. 210).
In writing Troubles, Farrell made a conscious decision to employ Ireland, the country where he spent part of his childhood each year, and he drew upon a variety of literary and historical resources. One important literary influence was the genre of the Big House novel. As Ronald Tam-plin explains, “From Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) on, a considerable number of Irish writers produced novels set in, often dominated by, a Big House, the type of grand house in which Anglo-Irish landowning families lived, drawing rent from the tenant farmers around and occupying something of a feudal relation to the locality, though not always accepting a feudal responsibility” (Tamplin in Crane, p. 49; see Castle Rackrent in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). Examples from twentieth-century literature would include Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929), Henry Green’s Loving (1945) and John Banville’s Birch-wood (1973). The Majestic’s infernal fate is very much part of the conventions of Big House fiction, and it in fact bears witness to the fortunes of many Big Houses during the transitional months of Irish independence. As Richard Gill notes, the burning of the Big House “was more dramatically linked with revolutionary social change: the home passed away with the Anglo-Irish establishment. During the Troubles, the house was usually burned to the ground and as a charred ruin became a monument to a vanished order” (Gill, p. 168).
The fiery fate of the Majestic, then, invokes a conventional novelistic representation of the end of British rale in Ireland. One vital difference between Farrell’s Big House and the Big Houses of convention, though, is the status of the Majestic as a hotel. This status underlines the temporary nature of Britain’s accommodation in Ireland. It ako signals the fact that, while Troubles uses aspects of the Big House novel, it is not a typical or conventional Big House novel. Indeed, Troubles is characterized by a postmodernist self-consciousness on the part of Farrell who makes it plain to his readers that he is cheerfully playing with the conventions of the genre and not following them faithfully. We are never allowed to forget that the novel is not a faithful representation of Ireland in 1919-21 but a fictional recreation from a later age; the reader is always aware that the world of Troubles is first-and-foremost a fictional illusion. On this point the “factual” newspaper extracts which intrude into and punctuate the text are absolutely vital: they make sure that the reader never forgets that the narrative he or she is reading stands at a remove from more conventional or reliable forms of historical documentation. This self-consciously literary approach offsets the more documentary aspects of the novel, and accounts for its haunting atmosphere. Farrels Ireland is caught somewhere between the worlds of history and illusion, fact and fiction.
Two further influences are important to the creation of the Majestic. First, Farrell exploits the conventions of gothic fiction. The Majestic is a dark, at times sinister and mysterious location with hidden horrors. His first night at the hotel, the Major’s attempts to sleep are disturbed by a peculiar smell that pervades his room. On investigation he is terrified to find a rotting sheep’s head infested with maggots, and he vomits copiously at the discovery. The servant, Murphy, is an ancient figure who moves mysteriously through the hotel; indeed, he seems the only character who knows each twist and turn of the vast building, and he startles the guests with his sudden appearances. At the end of the novel he is glimpsed standing amongst the inferno of the hotel with “his clothes a cloak of fire, his hair ablaze: Satan himself! Then he vanished and was never seen again in Kilnalough” (Troubles, pp. 443-44). Farrels biographer, Lavinia Greacen, has recently revealed another major influence on the creation of the Majestic Hotel—the burnt ruin known as Ocean View Hotel on Block Island, New York, which Farrell visited in May 1967 (Greacen, pp. 224-25). Inspired by the ruin, Farrell spent the next weeks researching the history of life at the formerly prestigious hotel.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written
The troubles of 1969
Farrell conceived of writing a book about Ireland in 1967 while living in New York. He had moved there the previous year to take up a Harkness Fellowship, which he finished in London in 1969. By an act of remarkable historical coincidence of which Farrell was keenly aware, during the very period in which he was writing about the troubles of 1919-21, the modern “troubles” in Northern Ireland emerged. As Lavinia Greacen notes, “Jim often took the tube home from North London or Bloomsbury surrounded by commuters reading the Evening Standard accounts of disturbances that mirrored events he had just been unearthing” (Greacen, pp. 254-55). As he quipped to Caroline Moorehead in an interview, “I couldn’t help feeling that in some way I had evoked what was happening” (Moorehead, p. 12). Indeed, there is little doubt that Farrels sense of the troubles of 1919-21 was heightened by the conflict in Northern Ireland, which exploded at the time he was writing his novel.
EDWARD SPENCER AND EDMUND SPENSER
The proprietor of the Majestic Hotel, Edward Spencer, is modeled on the sixteenth-century English poet Edmund Spenser, who spent a great deal of his adult life in Ireland, first as secretary to the Governor General of Ireland and later as the Sheriff of Cork. Edmund Spenser owned a three-thousand-acre estate, Kilcolm Castle, on which he intended to settle a community of English immigrants. His advocacy of colonialism in Ireland was eloquently expressed in his treatise A View to the Present State of Ireland. Like the Majestic, Kilcolm Castle was burned in October 1598 during a rebellion and Spenser was driven back to England. So, in modeling the fictional Edward Spencer on the real-life Edmund Spenser, Farrell deliberately called attention to the long history of the British colonial presence in Ireland, and resistances to it, offering another important historical context in which to read the troubles of 1919-21.
As explained, the Anglo-Irish treaty of December 6, 1921, had effectively created two countries: the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. The latter consisted of the six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry (or Derry) and Tyrone. Collectively known to some as Ulster, the area’s population was predominantly Protestant although a significant number were Catholics. Fiercely opposed to the idea of an all-Ireland republic ruled from Dublin, Protestant Northern Ireland had a form of devolved government with its own prime minister and chamber at Stormont. But Catholic nationalist sentiment in Northern Ireland had never gone away, and it began to mount in the 1960s. Increasingly angered at the discriminatory policies and activities in Northern Ireland, under which Protestants received preferential treatment in government posts, employment, and housing, in 1964 the Catholic communities formed the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association to protest the undemocratic conditions they were suffering. They organized a number of marches during subsequent months. One march, in January 1969, was violently attacked by a Protestant mob; significantly, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) arrested 80 Catholic marchers but not a single Protestant attacker. To many Catholics it seemed that the RUC often quickly sided with Protestants when any conflict arose between the two communities. In August 1969 riots flared in Belfast and British troops were deployed to restore law and order. On July 12, for example, there was an annual Apprentice Boys march of Ulster Protestants through Deny to commemorate the siege of Londonderry against the forces of King James II. The march triggered a three-day riot between police and Derry’s Catholic community that would become known as the Siege of the Bogside. The modern Irish “troubles” had truly begun.
The end of the year saw the re-emergence of the IRA as the organizer and instigator of violent protest against the perceived persecution of Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland. In calling for a united Irish Republic, and in portraying itself as defender of the north, who had little if any faith in the ability of RUC to uphold law and order with impartiality, the IRA won popular support in some parts of Northern Ireland’s Catholic community. Recalling the guerrilla tactics of Michael Collins during the War of Independence of 1919-21, the IRA carried out a series of attacks in both Northern Ireland and mainland Britain. In fact, during the period in which he wrote Troubles, J. G. Farrell was stopped by police outside Victoria Station in London as the IRA bombing campaign intensified. The IRA proved themselves to be a ruthless and formidable terrorist organization for many years to come, making RUC officers and police stations focal points of attack, much as the RIC officers were in 1919-21. In August 1971, a year after the publication of Troubles, Brian Faulkner, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, would introduce “internment” in the province in an attempt to regain control of the increasingly chaotic and violent situation. Internment allowed the RUC to arrest and hold without trial anyone suspected of being involved in IRA activities. But the situation failed to improve. On January 30, 1972, 13 unarmed Catholic civilians were shot dead by British troops in Deny. Remembered as Bloody Sunday, the incident would prove a turning point in Northern Ireland’s history. As violence escalated in its wake, the Stormont administration was dissolved on March 20, 1972, by the British prime minister, Edward Heath, and the administration of Northern Ireland became the full responsibility of parliament in Westminster, England.
Reviews
The Empire Trilogy changed Farrell’s life considerably, winning him critical acclaim and securing his reputation as one of Britain’s most promising and inventive postwar writers. Troubles kicked off the acclaim, receiving a mostly positive reception. The anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement enjoyed the hallucinogenic qualities of the novel: “Everything in the book, or almost everything, is observed, as it were, at a remove, through curtains of fine lawn hung blowily and shabbily at leaky windows; and these impose a blurred, half ghostly outline on scenes and situations” (Times Literary Supplement, p. 85). But the poet James Fenton, writing in the New Statesman, was less impressed. He described the novel as “an unhappy mixture of the historical, political and fantastical” and commented that “the essential arbitrariness of the whole conception in imaginative terms undermines its well-researched political and documentary observations” (Fenton, p. 14). However, the judgement of novelist William Trevor would prove more accurate, as evidenced by the subsequent success of the novel. In his estimation, as expressed in the Guardian, Troubles was “a tour de force of considerable quality” (Trevor in Greacen, p. 266). The literary world agreed with him. On May 6, 1971, Farrell was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and received a check for £250. As Lavinia Greacen puts it, “Overnight, and without any other further call on his own resources, he was a literary star” (Greacen, p. 267).
—John McLeod
For More Information
Binns, Ronald. J. G. Farrell. London: Methuen, 1986.
Crane, Ralph, ed. J. G. Farrell: The Critical Grip. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999.
Dean, Malcolm. “An Insight Job.” Guardian, 1 September 1973, 11.
“District Inspector Murdered.” The Times (London), 2 September 1920, 10.
Donnelly, Brian. “The Big House in the Recent Iris Novel.” Studies: Irish Quarterly Review 14 (1975):133-42.
“End of a Dream.” Review of Troubles, by J. G. Farrell, Times Literary Supplement, 22 January 1971, 85.
Farrell, J. G. Troubles. London: Flamingo, 1970.
Fenton, James. “Victims.” New Statesman, 9 October 1970, 464.
Gill, Richard. Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1972.
Greacen, Lavinia. J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer. London: Bloomsbury, 1999.
Kee, Robert. Ireland: A History. Rev. ed. London:Abacus, 1995.
Moorehead, Caroline. “Writing in the Dark, and 85. Not a Detail Missed.” Times, 9 September 1978, 12.
Spurling, John. “As Does the Bishop.” In A. G. Farrell, The Hill Station: An Unfinished Novel and an Indian Diary. Ed. John Spurling. London:Flamingo, 1981.