Troubles, J.G. Farrell.

Nicholas, I hated this book.

To back up a step: Nick, a good friend of mine, is currently in pursuit of a Ph.D in English. That is to say, he reads a lot of novels. So you would think that I could trust him when it comes to recommendations. Normally, however, I simply ignore his suggestions; we generally have very different taste in literature. We share, though, a love of grand British country houses of the interwar period, with a particular interest in those that are somehow slightly decaying. There are few better backgrounds for a novel than the dying throes of a fading class, when the reader knows that the power is slowly slipping from those privileged hands and destruction looms just around the corner. Thus he spent several years recommending J.G. Farrell's Troubles. The back of the book reads:

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 fiancée 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.

This, then, had all the makings of a hit. The setting seemed perfect - here we have a country house that is actually crumbling, history approaching at an even more rapid clip than usual. Promisingly, it is the start of a trilogy on the dissolution of the British empire, so it even offered follow-up reading. The recommendation was not acted upon for several years mainly because of the difficulty in acquiring the book - I finally found a copy at a used book store in Toronto. So by the time I started reading, I had some very high hopes.

Alas.

I don't ask for protagonists or even supporting characters to be likeable. It's nice when they are, certainly, but more than that I want them to be interesting. The characters in Troubles, especially the protagonist, all felt flat. They rarely felt like real human beings, but instead skittered through the pages, acting in strange ways for inexplicable reasons.

The Major, as the narration constantly refers to him, is dull. The habit of referring to him by his military title has an odd dehumanizing effect, making it feel as though he thinks of himself as some cardboard version of a soldier rather than an actual individual man. In addition to seeming oddly formal, the rank hardly seems to fit. To reach the status of Major, even in a time of crisis, presumably one must either come from money and privilege or demonstrate some leadership capability. Decamped as he is to Ireland, at a hotel where he is a personal guest and not a paying one, it seems unlikely that this Major gained his commission by virtue of his birth. But if he was a man of action before or during his time in the military, he's certainly not one anymore.

Little is said of his wartime experiences, but with enough prior knowledge of the era it isn't too difficult to imagine that he spent most of it waiting in the trenches, not doing much of anything but worrying. There is an unspoken element of shell-shock to him, and a certain feeling of being quite lost in the world, both of which make sense given the circumstances. But he has very little in the way of an interior life, almost nothing in the way of forward movement. His primary emotions are boredom, frustration, and obsession. For most of the book, I got to share in those first two. He is oddly committed to riding out his Irish adventure, if one could call it that, until he is absolutely forced to leave. He makes as few decisions and takes as little action as possible, but he is no Hamlet; there is no soliloquizing here.

The "beautiful and bitter" Sarah Devlin feels like a caricature. She runs hot and cold, but mostly cruel. It is impossible to see anything but misguided lust in the Major's obsession with her.  Her cruelty seems to be her main source of entertainment, without much in the way of deeper reason.

She also has the infuriating habit of talking in parentheses. I have no objection to parentheses as a rule, and believe that they have a legitimate and useful place in written communication. That place, however, is not in written dialogue, contrary to what Farrell clearly thought. The parentheses only appeared in her dialogue, and were clearly meant to convey her particular style of speaking, but every time they occurred I had an image of someone doing air-parentheses in the midst of a conversation, some mutant form of air-quotes with cupped hands and wide eyes. I found the unusual punctuation use distracting to the process of reading rather than distracting to the conversation as presumably intended.

The hotel, almost a character as well as the setting, is indeed decaying, with holes in the upper floors and balconies crashing down and an actual jungle overtaking the inside. The whole thing seems so fetid, though, that it has lost all sense of grandeur save for physical enormity and has become a massive hovel. I spent the whole book wanting the place to finally burn down, as the very first page had promised. I prefer my decay, it turns out, metaphorical rather than literal.

I would wholeheartedly not recommend this book. I feel slightly odd starting off with such a negative review, but it was this book and all of the things I wanted to complain about to Nick that first gave me the idea for this project, so I've decided to go with it anyway. Next time, I will write about something I actually enjoyed reading. In the meantime, if you've read Troubles and have anything to add or dispute, fire away!