A book that never lets me down
Rachel Cooke on the Lost Man Booker winner
I've read Troubles at three different times in my life, and all I can say is: this is a book that never lets me down. I read it first as a teenager; it was a favourite of my father's, and he pressed it on me. I read it again in my early thirties, and then, just a few weeks ago, when I was invited to judge the Lost Man Booker Prize. Each time I read it, it seems to grow more wonderful. I'm not sure that there is such a thing as a perfect book, but Troubles surely comes close. No word is out of place, no metaphor over-worked. It is original, wise, and unnervingly prescient. It is sometimes very funny, but this is a humour that only serves to make the book's sadness, which runs very deep, seem all the more profound. And it has one of the best - if not the best - ending of any novel I have read: high drama followed by a soaring epiphany. As I write this, I find myself thinking that I can't wait to read it again.
Troubles is set shortly after the end of the First World War. Major Brendan Archer, the novel's wry and indecisive hero, fought in the Trenches. He saw some terrible things - how easily arms and legs and heads come away from the body! - though Farrell rarely makes this horror explicit. The Major has no family, save for an aunt, but he does have a fiancee, Angela, whom he unaccountably collected during a brief leave. All he knows of her, he has garnered from her letters. A member of the Anglo-Irish ruling class, she lives in the Majestic Hotel, in rural Ireland, with her eccentric father, her brother, and a collection of old ladies, the hotel's only guests. Archer decides to go and claim her; they will marry.
Soon after the Major's arrival at the Majestic, it becomes clear that he and Angela will not marry, after all (I will not reveal why, here, for fear of spoiling the story). Really, he now should leave. But he gets ‘stuck' at the Majestic, like a wasp in jam. It asserts a strange hold over him, though he is also, by now, mooning over another unsuitable woman, Sarah, who lives nearby. The once grand Majestic, weird and listless and decaying, is the single greatest character in Troubles. Farrell tells us that it is "boiling" with cats - these cats are significant, later - and has a palm court in which creepers dangle from above "like emerald intestines". And, of course, in the author's hands it is also a beautiful metaphor for the British Empire which, outside in the real world, is crumbling to nothing; for mutability, for loss, for the perplexing and inexorable passage of time. The goings-on at the Majestic take place against a backdrop of increasing violence, on the part of both Sinn Fein and the Black and Tans. At first, this violence is in the distance. Slowly, though, it moves ever closer.
J G Farrell, though he eventually went on to win the Booker Prize (in 1973, for The Siege of Krishnapur), did not have an easy time with Troubles, his fourth novel. He was stony broke, and living in a "dingy bed-sitting room" in Notting Hill, a London suburb not half so glamorous then as it is now. In his recently published letters, we find him agonising about the book, his confidence in it often under siege. He complains that Tom Maschler, his publisher at Cape, has only "muted enthusiasm" for it, and worries that he will not promote it. He begins to think that Troubles is "aptly-named". Perhaps the greatest irony, however, is that Cape's big book of that September, 1970, was Patrick White's The Vivisector, another of the novels short-listed for the Lost Man Booker Prize. Anxiously, Farrell ponders his publication date. In a letter to his agent, he writes: "If I have to appear in the same week as a ‘big' novelist, it might as well be boring old C P Snow as anyone (but maybe I don't)." In the end, it was published to mixed reviews, and it sold... well, let's just say it was hardly a bestseller.
Today, of course, this sorry beginning has long since faded to grey. Troubles, like a fine racehorse, has won through in the end. It might have started out from what its author felt to be a position of obscurity and hopelessness. But its brilliant, exquisite writing has stood the test of time, finding adoring new readers every year. Unlike the gasping, wheezing hotel at its heart, it is unassailable - as enduring as the marble statue of Venus which, in the end, will be the Major's only memento of his strange and unwarranted stay at the Majestic.
Rachel Cooke was on the judging panel of the Lost Man Booker Prize.
The panel decided on the shortlist of six titles, and the public voted for the winning novel.
