Additional Book Information
Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590170182
Pages: 480
Publication Date: October 31, 2002
Troubles
by J.G. Farrell, introduction by John Banville
Winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize, awarded in 2010, to a book published in 1970
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.”
Troubles is a hilarious and heartbreaking work by a modern master of the historical novel.
Praise
We find in Farrell’s novels links between the depicted colonial past and the postcolonial present that yield an abundance of ironies and ambiguous parallels.
—Ivan Kreilkamp, Public Books
Remarkable .... Mr. Farrell deserves high praise for this novel. It is subtly modulated, richly textured, sad, funny, and altogether memorable.
— Times Literary Supplement
A tour de force .... sad, tragic, also very funny.
— The Guardian
Farrell wrote superbly; all his books had a quality that hallmarks great literary talent—he could "do" texture. This album—which is what Troubles feels like—records the same Anglo-Irish as Elizabeth Bowen knew and belonged to. As with Bowen, this feels like the real thing (which is all a novel has to do). Always judge a writer by his grasp of what he doesn't know: Farrell died young yet his old people are almost his best creations.
— Frank Delaney, The Guardian