Quote:
Originally Posted by sun surfer
For my last nomination I offer Troubles by J.G. Farrell. It’s the winner of the ‘Lost’ Man Booker Prize.
We still have at least a few more hours to go but I’ll add in more info about it, update the first post and start the vote a little later when I’m not on mobile.
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I chose
Troubles because like many of the nominations this month it revolves around an assorted cast of unusual characters. In this one, set just after WWI, a man returns to Ireland to find out if he's still engaged to his fiancé, whose family owns a grand hotel although the family and hotel are now on a steep decline. He finds his fiancé strangely altered and he apparently moves into the hotel, where the few remaining guests enjoy rumours and whist among all the disintegration of the hotel including cats taking over the bar and piglets taking over the squash courts. Well, most of that will also appear just below in the quoted abstract too
, but something that won't be there is that it's been described not only as a first-rate historical novel, it's also romantic, gothic, mournful and full of dark humour. It won the Lost Man Booker Prize, which was awarded in 2010 because there originally was no winner for books from 1970 simply because of a rules change (until 1970 the award was for the previous year; in 1971 it became for the current year thus leaving 1970's crop out in the cold... it was odd they didn't make up for it at the time somehow but anyway they did 40 years later).
Goodreads 459 pages, 1970, Ireland & England
Quote:
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.
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