Book Review: Troubles

Troubles by J.G. Farrell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I did not actually mean to read this book--at least not just now. I'd downloaded it awhile ago, and was just glancing at the first pages to see what it was like, and suddenly I was a quarter of the way through it. Set in a crumbling hotel in rural Ireland during "The Troubles" in the 1920s (Catholic/Protestant, British/Irish conflicts), the story is about a British major who comes home from the war and goes to this hotel to reunite with a fiancee he's not exactly wild about, and though he doesn't end up marrying her, he ends up just ... staying. The book is full of dry humor, stinging absurdity, and happenings and characters that verge on ridiculous and yet somehow never fall over the edge into banal nonsense. Great writing, excellent atmosphere, interesting characters, along with this continuing sense that everything is slightly surreal and yet also ... very ordinary. "Troubles" is the perfect title. Hard to characterize, but I really liked it.



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