When I recently spotted a copy of J.G. Farrell's A Girl in the Head on the shelves of a second-hand bookshop (actually my favourite second-hand bookshop in all England - The Bookshop in Wirksworth), I bought it out of curiosity. Having recently reread Farrell's masterpiece, Troubles, I was interested to sample one of his earlier works.
A Girl in the Head was published in 1967, the last of three novels that preceded Troubles, and it attracted little acclaim, or even notice. It is a kind of black comedy set in a dreary English seaside resort, Maidenhair Bay, where one Boris Slattery, an ageing cynic and chancer, now lives, with various others, in the family home of his unhappy wife, Flower. Slattery - by his own account an aristocrat of middle-European descent - is on his uppers, and arrives in Maidenhair Bay by chance, having stepped off the train there on a whim. He has two overriding obsessions - himself, and a beautiful young Swedish girl who is coming to stay in the family home for the summer. In fact, Boris's eye for young and underage girls make for some pretty queasy reading; this unreliable narrator has none of the charm, wit or poetry of Humbert Humbert.
A Girl in the Head charts Boris's largely sordid, drink-sozzled life in Maidenhair Bay, and the devious machinations by which he attempts - and usually fails - to further his ends. He sometimes comes across as a kind of literary Ed Reardon, but is mostly less engaging even than that. His milieu - the small seaside town, the beach, the changing weather - is skilfully evoked, Farrell's strong sense of place showing through. Similarly the author's ingenuity in devising situations of excruciating physical embarrassment is often in evidence. But beyond that there is really nothing to suggest that the next time this author published a novel it would be one of the greatest of his time - Troubles.
To achieve that leap, to unleash his full creative power, he needed - as he was already sensing - a broader canvas, or rather a context of greater historical significance in which to place his hopelessly befuddled characters. Farrell was living in New York at the time of A Girl in the Head's publication, and reading up on the Irish War of Independence (of which his mother had some memories). He was also toying with various possible fictional scenarios, including a man trapped in an apartment building; a passive, possibly suicidal, Englishman abroad; a military widower with a teenage daughter; and a man battling with hordes of cockroaches (Farrell's hotel room was infested with these forerunners of the Majestic's cats in Troubles). Taking a break from his creative struggles, he took a boat to Block Island - and there he had his Eureka moment, looking around the spectacular remains of the burnt-out Ocean View Hotel, all twisted pipes, molten glass, charred beams, washbasins and blackened bedsprings. Yes, the very image of the burnt-out Majestic Hotel so vividly described in the opening pages of Troubles. Farrell had found his inspiration - the inspiration so sadly lacking in A Girl in the Head.
Odd, isn't it, how many of our best writers have found their true strength, or at least a new lease of life, by turning from the present to the historical past for their mise en scรจne? Penelope Fitzgerald and Beryl Bainbridge being other obvious examples, not to mention Hilary Mantel...
Showing posts with label J.G. Farrell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J.G. Farrell. Show all posts
Sunday, 6 March 2016
Saturday, 4 April 2015
Farrell's Troubles: Lost and Found
Recently I was chatting of this and that with Bryan when the subject of J.G. Farrell came up. Is he still read, we wondered (in the manner of the Marsh-Marlowe Letters). He was good, we recalled - God, he was really good. Shame if he's on his way to becoming a forgotten writer - he was far too good for that. The Siege of Krishnapur, The Singapore Grip, Troubles - especially Troubles...
Sure enough, a week or so later I was browsing in a charity shop and there it was on the bookshelves, giving me the glad eye - Troubles! A Flamingo paperback edition from 1984 (original publication was 1970 - this was the first of Farrell's 'Empire trilogy'). Reader, I bought it. Reader, I have read it. Reader, I was not sorry - I have loved it all over again, just as I did when I first read it back in the 70s.
Troubles chronicles the experiences of Major Brendan Archer, coming out of the Army after the 1914 war and travelling to rural Ireland, to the crumbling Majestic Hotel, owned by the family of a girl to whom he somehow got engaged while on leave three years ago. Since then, their relationship (if that's the word) has been sustained by a string of bewilderingly detailed and impersonal letters from her - and things become no less bewildering, on all fronts and in every way, when the Major arrives at The Majestic, a once grand establishment that now barely functions as a hotel and is populated mostly by dotty old ladies with nowhere else to go.
The Major is an upright, conventional, faintly absurd character, often ineffectual, always an easy prey for any woman who cares to run rings around him. Over the next three years or so, the Major (who also has nowhere much else to go) finds himself unable to tear himself away from the decaying hotel and its mystifying ways. He falls in love and is duly run rings around. He frets about the state of the hotel and the troubling developments in Ireland that he reads about in the papers. The building, already in a bad way, becomes increasingly decayed and uninhabitable, while the locals become restive and 'troubles' begin to break out - small things at first, but building up...
This is a long novel - a full 450 pages - but it is extraordinarily readable, largely (I think) because it never descends into solemnity, despite its darker themes, but retains a sparkling, unpredictable brightness. The Major is a likeable, strangely compelling character, and Farrell clearly has a magical gift for storytelling. This is a real page-turner, it is very funny - often laugh-aloud funny - and it is, I think, something very like a great novel, a classic.
Happily, I discovered after my re-reading that Troubles had not been forgotten but was awarded the once-only Lost Booker Prize, for novels written in the 'lost' period of 1970 when the Booker changed its criteria and its timing. The judges were surprisingly - and rightly - unanimous that it had to be Troubles. Sadly, Farrell himself, at the height of his powers and aged just 44, died in 1979, swept out to sea while fishing in Bantry Bay. Heaven knows what he might have achieved had he lived longer. But what he left behind - the Empire Trilogy at least - is amazing stuff and should never be forgotten. If you haven't had the pleasure, read him; if you have, reread him.
Sure enough, a week or so later I was browsing in a charity shop and there it was on the bookshelves, giving me the glad eye - Troubles! A Flamingo paperback edition from 1984 (original publication was 1970 - this was the first of Farrell's 'Empire trilogy'). Reader, I bought it. Reader, I have read it. Reader, I was not sorry - I have loved it all over again, just as I did when I first read it back in the 70s.
Troubles chronicles the experiences of Major Brendan Archer, coming out of the Army after the 1914 war and travelling to rural Ireland, to the crumbling Majestic Hotel, owned by the family of a girl to whom he somehow got engaged while on leave three years ago. Since then, their relationship (if that's the word) has been sustained by a string of bewilderingly detailed and impersonal letters from her - and things become no less bewildering, on all fronts and in every way, when the Major arrives at The Majestic, a once grand establishment that now barely functions as a hotel and is populated mostly by dotty old ladies with nowhere else to go.
The Major is an upright, conventional, faintly absurd character, often ineffectual, always an easy prey for any woman who cares to run rings around him. Over the next three years or so, the Major (who also has nowhere much else to go) finds himself unable to tear himself away from the decaying hotel and its mystifying ways. He falls in love and is duly run rings around. He frets about the state of the hotel and the troubling developments in Ireland that he reads about in the papers. The building, already in a bad way, becomes increasingly decayed and uninhabitable, while the locals become restive and 'troubles' begin to break out - small things at first, but building up...
This is a long novel - a full 450 pages - but it is extraordinarily readable, largely (I think) because it never descends into solemnity, despite its darker themes, but retains a sparkling, unpredictable brightness. The Major is a likeable, strangely compelling character, and Farrell clearly has a magical gift for storytelling. This is a real page-turner, it is very funny - often laugh-aloud funny - and it is, I think, something very like a great novel, a classic.
Happily, I discovered after my re-reading that Troubles had not been forgotten but was awarded the once-only Lost Booker Prize, for novels written in the 'lost' period of 1970 when the Booker changed its criteria and its timing. The judges were surprisingly - and rightly - unanimous that it had to be Troubles. Sadly, Farrell himself, at the height of his powers and aged just 44, died in 1979, swept out to sea while fishing in Bantry Bay. Heaven knows what he might have achieved had he lived longer. But what he left behind - the Empire Trilogy at least - is amazing stuff and should never be forgotten. If you haven't had the pleasure, read him; if you have, reread him.
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