Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [2]
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 wonderful, and curiously erotic, invention—are growing half-wild too, the staff and servants lurk like wood-sprites, the boy Padraig is turning transvestite, and Murphy the major-domo 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.
—JOHN BANVILLE
Troubles
Part One: A Member of the Quality
IN THOSE DAYS the Majestic was still standing in Kilnalough at the very end of a slim peninsula covered with dead pines leaning here and there at odd angles. At that time there were probably yachts there too during the summer since the hotel held a regatta every July. These yachts would have been beached on one or other of the sandy crescents that curved out towards the hotel on each side of the peninsula. But now both pines and yachts have floated away and one day the high tide may very well meet over the narrowest part of the peninsula, made narrower by erosion. As for the regatta, for some reason it was discontinued years ago, before the Spencers took over the management of the place. And a few years later still the Majestic itself followed the boats and preceded the pines into oblivion by burning to the ground—but by that time, of course, the place was in such a state of disrepair that it hardly mattered.
Curiously, in spite of the corrosive effect of the sea air the charred remains of the enormous main building are still to be seen; for some reason—the poor quality of the soil or the proximity