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J. G. FARRELL (1935–1979) was born with a caul, long considered a sign of good fortune. Academically and athletically gifted, Farrell grew up in England and Ireland. In 1956, during his first term at Oxford, he suffered what seemed a minor injury on the rugby pitch. Within days, however, he was diagnosed with polio, which nearly killed him and left him permanently weakened. Farrell’s early novels, which include The Lung (1965) and A Girl in the Head (1967), have been overshadowed by his Empire Trilogy—Troubles (1970), the Booker Prize–winning The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), and The Singapore Grip (1978). Troubles was set into motion when he came upon a grand hotel destroyed by fire on Block Island, Rhode Island, in 1967: “Old bedsprings twisted with heat; puddles of molten glass; washbowls that had fallen through to the foundations; a flight of stone steps leading up to thin air; twisted pipes; lots of nails lying everywhere and a few charred beams.” In early 1979, Farrell bought a farmhouse in Bantry Bay on the Irish coast. “I’ve been trying to write,” he admitted, “but there are so many competing interests—the prime one at the moment is fishing off the rocks . . . Then a colony of bees has come to live above my back door and I’m thinking of turning them into my feudal retainers.” On August 11, Farrell was hit by a wave while fishing and was washed out to sea. His body was found a month later.

JOHN BANVILLE was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of twelve novels, including The Book of Evidence, which was short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize, The Untouchable, and Eclipse.

Troubles

J.G. Farrell

Introduction by John Banville

New York Review Books

New York

Contents

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

TROUBLES

Part One: A member of the quality

Part Two: Troubles

Copyright and More Information

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.

We too had our lives to live...”

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,