Page 9 - September 2020

LITTERATEUR

NOVEL AND ROMANCE IN THE WAR WITHOUT BATTLES OF J.G. FARREL

As if that were not enough, Archer reads the newspapers distractedly, which would bring him back to
the violent reality (to the novel): the Major is increasingly tired of understanding what looks like a war
without battles and without trenches.
In the end, as is to be expected, the history (the Troubles) has the upper hand, the novel prevails over
romance: Archer is attacked, wounded, kidnapped and left at the mercy of the waves (probably) by the

Sinn Feiners. However, Farrell does not expect the man of the Great War to make a heroic sacrifice (as a
novel) in a conflict that is, after all, alien to him: the outcome is a paradoxical rescue (the providential
intervention of some elderly hotel guests). As for the Majestic, it collapses not because of obvious
structural problems: it is the old Irish butler Murphy who, mad or perhaps simply drunk, sets fire to the
building where he worked for so many years.
The whole narrative is shrouded in nostalgia for the British belle époque and its irony is recurrent and

often cruel; the extravagant Spencer family represents the rich Anglo-Irish rulers in all their
anachronistic privileges in a collapsing system. Although he is the main consciousness of The Troubles,
Major Brendan Archer, traumatized and suffering, remains distant from the reader. The subtle sense of
is
despair and resignation at the end of the imperial grandeur (the enormous crumbling building)
typical of Farrell's narrator.

L I T T E R A T E U R
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