#he was brutal and menacing and was always a constant threat whenever in battle

[kesoyotes]

@tmaynt Challenge: Day 21 - Favorite Shredder

" Your skills are impressive ... but they will not save you. "

[marginalgloss]

different and worse

‘…There were so many ways in which the vast army of the dead could be drilled, classified, inspected, and made to present their ghostly arms. No end to the institutions, civilian and military, busy drawing up their sombre balance sheet and recording it in wood, stone or metal. But if there was no end to the institutions there was no end to the dead men either. In truth, there were more than enough to go round several times over…’

Troubles was not the first novel by J.G. Farrell, but it was the first to achieve really significant literary success. Farrell wrote three novels set in a loosely connected trilogy set in the twilight of the British empire — I read The Singapore Grip last year, and I’ve been meaning to revisit this one, which I first read many years ago. It might be the best thing Farrell ever wrote, though I now find myself wanting to reread The Siege of Krishnapur as well.

Troubles is set in Ireland, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Having been freshly discharged from the army, Brendan Archer (mostly known as ‘the Major’) travels there to visit Angela Spencer; Brendan is more or less convinced that he and Angela are engaged, having met previously while he was on leave from the front lines. They have exchanged letters since, but on arriving at her home — the Majestic hotel — he finds her distant. Her father, Edward, is a model of English strength and reserve. And then there is the hotel itself: a gothic revival falling apart at the seams, overrun by potted plants and cats, populated by a skeleton crew of staff and flocks of elderly women. 

The hotel is labyrinthine and seemingly fathomless, like something out of Ballard or Borges. It is an unmappable confection of turrets and towers, sewn up with catwalks, stairwells, secret corridors. The tennis courts are thick with weeds; the glass ceiling of the ballroom is on the verge of collapse; there are strange things swimming in the murky remnants of the swimming pool. Here, at the end of a lonely peninsula, the residents are cut off from the outside world. The only reminder that the Irish exist at all comes from the figures glimpsed at the roadside, sometime seen standing in the fields, or rummaging in the bins at the house. (Many of them are starving.) 

We soon realise that the Major lives in a state of post-traumatic myopia. Everything around him seems to take place in a sort of dreamlike haze. Like a typical man of his class he makes a point of not seeing things about how the world is operating, but his experiences in the war place him at a further remove from the rest of society. He is typically English; he adopts an attitude of perpetual befuddlement, leaning heavily on privilege and impatience to get himself through the day. He is inflexible and uncommunicative. But he is also deeply traumatised. His memories are shot full of holes:

‘Although he was sure that he had never actually proposed to Angela during the few days of their acquaintance, it was beyond doubt that they were engaged: a certainty fostered by the fact that from the very beginning she had signed her letters ‘Your loving fiancée, Angela’. This had surprised him at first. But, with the odour of death drifting into the dug-out in which he scratched out his replies by the light of a candle, it would have been trivial and discourteous beyond words to split hairs about such purely social distinctions.’

Ireland is riven by violence. Rumours of killings are rife around the hotel. People are shot in ones and twos every day, apparently at random. Interspersed throughout the book are newspaper clippings, many of which seem absurd. It seems a bleak, purposeless cycle of assault and recrimination. But in spite of the resident paranoia, next to nothing actually happens on the grounds of the Majestic. No republican ‘shinners’ appear intent on massacring the residents in their beds. But regardless, the English are determined to make a stand — even if it is only in the bar of the local pub.

This novel was first published in 1970, at a time when Northern Ireland was seeing some of the worst violence in the latter half of the twentieth century. By comparison the level of strife depicted here seems almost parochial by comparison. But this is because the whole text of the novel is sunk within the consciousness of an observer who is too broken himself to see what’s really happening. After all, this is 1919: in historical terms we are in the thick of the Irish war of independence. The country would finally become its own nation state a few years later. But none of it feels that way to the characters in the book.

Perhaps there’s something about it that approximates the feeling of watching the news in the late sixties or early seventies— while living in England, of course. It is a constant drip-feed of appalling atrocity, delivered with the benefit of distance so that the expected response from the audience is to feel exactly as the Major does: ‘An old man is gunned down in the street and within a couple of days this senseless act is both normal and inevitable,’ reflects the Major. For him these killings might as well be happening in a vacuum. Names like De Valera float through the air, but they might as well belong to legendary beings. There’s no awareness of history or context. There is barely a line in this book which affords a glimpse of the world from an Irish perspective. We don’t know how they might feel about it because we aren’t told. 

‘The Major only glanced at the newspaper these days, tired of trying to comprehend a situation which defied comprehension, a war without battles or trenches. Why should one bother with the details: the raids for arms, the shootings of policemen, the intimidations? What could one learn from the details of chaos? Every now and then, however, he would become aware with a feeling of shock that, for all its lack of pattern, the situation was different, and always a little worse.’

We are stuck in the belly of the beast, and the beast is dying. The Major is trapped in ‘the country’s vast and narcotic inertia’. The hotel is falling apart. Angela vanishes not long after the Major arrives, and then she dies. Somehow this is not a cause for much regret. From then on, he has no reason to stay in Ireland, but the place has a strange gravity that seems to draw him back. And there is Sarah, a local woman who seems to have taken an interest in him. She is fiery, direct and open — far more than he — and initially she is mostly confined to a wheelchair. There are shades of Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity in their relationship: the Major is a model of polite restraint, while Sarah is openly flirtatious, at times frantic with emotion:

‘One day when he had been speaking, though impersonally, about marriage and its place in the modern world, she interrupted him brutally by saying: ‘It’s not a wife you’re looking for, Brendan. It’s a mother!’ The Major was upset because he had not, in fact, been saying he was looking for either. ‘Why are you so polite the whole time?’ she would ask derisively, while the Major, appalled, wondered what was wrong with being polite. ‘Why are you always fussing around those infernal old women? Can’t you smell how awful they are?’ she would demand, making a disgusted face, and when the Major said nothing she would burst out: ‘Because you’re an old woman yourself, that’s why.’ And since the Major maintained his hurt and dignified silence: ‘And for Jesus’ sake stop looking at me like a stuffed squirrel!’’

It’s a very funny book. Farrell was a masterful stylist, and he wields irony here like a weapon. There is humour to be had at the expense of the English in a way that recalls P. G. Wodehouse. But with Jeeves and Wooster there is the pleasure of retreating inside a world which is entirely its own — for the most part, nothing really awful can happen there. Whereas here, we are never allowed to forget that something awful is perpetually happening only just outside of that friendly bubble. And it isn’t so cosy inside the bubble either. 

Either way, we cannot forget that the characters of the novel are all implicated, if only through their vast unthinking ignorance. There is something very dark crouching at the heart of this book, something made all the more tragic by the Major’s essential simplicity, by his constant air of strained incomprehension. We know that he will never learn, that he will never grow. Somehow he is both entirely innocent and fully responsible for everything that goes wrong. 

He is not the only pathetic creature here. The author reserves a special combination of pathos and threat for the animals that reside at the Majestic. They are vehicles for fables in this story. There are the countless stray cats, which ride the dumb-waiters, climb through the chimneys and nest inside the wrecked sofas. (The biggest cat has orange fur and bright green eyes; a noteworthy colouring, perhaps.) And there’s Edward’s old dog, Rover, who has an especially hard time of it:

‘By degrees he was going blind; his eyes had turned to milky blue and he sometimes collided with the furniture. The smells he emitted while sitting at the feet of the whist-players became steadily more redolent of putrefaction. Like the Major, Rover had always enjoyed trotting from one room to another, prowling the corridors on this floor or that. But now, whenever he ventured up the stairs to nose around the upper storeys, as likely as not he would be set upon by an implacable horde of cats and chased up and down the corridors to the brink of exhaustion. More than once the Major found him, wheezing and spent, tumbling in terror down a flight of stairs from some shadowy menace on the landing above. Soon he got into the habit of growling whenever he saw a shadow. Then, as the shadows gathered with his progressively failing sight, he would rouse himself and bark fearfully even in the broadest of daylight, gripped by remorseless nightmares. Day by day, no matter how wide he opened his eyes, the cat-filled darkness continued to creep a little closer.’

There’s another elderly dog in Farrell’s later novel The Singapore Grip — an elderly spaniel who is nicknamed ‘The Human Condition’. The irony there is a bit less subtle, but the implication is equally bleak. By the end of this novel Edward and the Major will both be reduced to growling at shadows, each in their own way. But perhaps the Major has more in common with the deserted pet rabbit who has been left to fend for himself in the grounds of the hotel: 

‘…Old and fat, it had been partly tamed by the twins when they were small children. They had lost interest, of course, as they grew older, and no longer remembered to feed it. The rabbit, however, had not forgotten the halcyon days of carrots and dandelion leaves. Thinner and thinner as time went by, it had nevertheless continued to haunt the fringes of the wood like a forsaken lover…’

Of course the rabbit ends up riddled with bullets. He is shot to death by British soldiers for fun. But the twins are not as upset as the Major expects them to be. They only want to know if they can eat him.