Troubles, by J.G. Farrell (1970) - The Lost Booker

I’m sure everyone reading this blog (hello to all three of you!) knows the story behind The Lost Booker, but I might as well go over it again. In 1971, two years after the Booker prize was founded, the committee decided to change the rules so that the prize was no longer awarded retrospectively but was instead awarded to the best novel of the year of publication. To facilitate this, they moved the award date from April to November. However, this meant that a whole host of books published in 1970 were no longer eligible. When this gap was noticed, relatively recently, it was decided to hold a special one-off competition for all the books published in 1970 that were made ineligible for that year's prize due to the changing of dates. Well, Troubles, by J.G. Farrell, was chosen as the best of those books, which is why 1970 now has two official Booker winners. Farrell would go on to win the Booker in 1973 with The Siege of Krishnapur, which would have made him the first author to win the Booker twice, had Troubles been award the prize in 1970.

Anyway, on to the actual review. Troubles is a funny and touching book, a love story in some ways, an examination of the collapse of the British Empire in others, an excellent novel that deals subtly with some of the complex issues and events of Irish history. Set in the crumbling Majestic Hotel just before the War of Independence, the book deals with the travails of Major Brendan Archer, a retired British Army officer and veteran of the trenches of the First World War, who travels to the Majestic to meet the fiancée he accidentally acquired while on leave some time previously, and who ends up becoming seduced instead by the dream-like atmosphere of the hotel, its eccentric residents, the townspeople, and most especially by the Anglo-Irish Spencer family who own it.

The hotel is microcosm of the Anglo-Irish state. Collapsing around the ears of its incompetent and possibly mad British landlords, besieged by the IRA but threatened too by the ruthless brutality of the Black and Tans supposed to protect it, the hotel, like the state, is caught in an inexorable slide towards obsolescence. It’s a beautifully written book, subtle, funny and poignant, and the characters are memorable. As an Irishman, I was maybe a little put off by Farrell’s tendency to romanticise the Anglo-Irish characters somewhat, presenting their destruction, and the beginning of the end of the British Empire, in tender, almost elegiac tones, but I still really enjoyed the book and am glad that it has finally received the recognition it deserves.

The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood (2000)

An excellent novel, right up there with Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Banville’s The Sea as one of my favourite Booker winners so far, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is a book that spans genres and invokes various types of text, moving from love story to science-fiction novel, from telegrams to newspaper clippings, as it tells the story of the Chase sisters, Iris and Laura, daughters of a broken industrialist in inter-war Canada.

It’s hard to really describe the breadth of vision Atwood displays, because, ironically, the book’s focus is so narrow. It somehow manages to be a compelling romance, a social history of Canada in the 20th century, a treatise on aging, a pulp sci-fi adventure (no joke) and a murder mystery of sorts, while always remaining tightly focused on the lives of its two main characters, Iris and Laura Chase. Dealing with issues of history and memory, love and imagination, the violence and oppression to which women were subject in the early 20th century, and the practice of writing itself, the main action of the book plays out against a background of the First and Second World Wars, and the Great Depression. This may all sound confusing and overstuffed, but it isn’t. That Atwood is able to deal with so many themes, events and textual forms while never losing her focus on the personal story of the Chase girls is a testament to her skill as a writer.

The Blind Assassin is not just a good story, though. Atwood’s prose is brilliant, and her imagery is beautiful and evocative. It’s a pleasure to read an engrossing page-turner that is also beautifully written, as so much contemporary fiction seems to have one quality or the other, but rarely both.