3 - Ireland, 1919-1921

Summary

The first part of the Empire Trilogy, Troubles, signifies an important departure in Farrell's writing, although many of its aspects are redolent of the early fiction. Much of the novel's power derives from the encounter between the emotive issues of the 1960s novels - melancholy, the premature end of youth, illness, unrequited love, mortality and decline - and a new set of historical, political and literary concerns. Troubles, then, is best thought of as a transitional novel, announcing a new direction but drawing upon familiar preoccupations.

In setting Troubles in Ireland between July 1919 and the late Summer of 1921, Farrell turned to a period of public rather than private crisis. During these months the Irish fought a successful War of Independence against the occupying British colonial forces. The result was the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 6 December 1921, which formally relinquished British rule in Ireland and established a self-governing Irish Free State for twenty-six of its thirty-two counties. In looking to the past for inspiration, Farrell also turned to different kinds of novelistic genres - the Anglo-Irish ‘Big House’ novel, the colonial adventure story, the blockbuster - which he recast in terms of the ironic, melancholic and darkly comic vision that had been nurtured in the early novels.

It is important to recognize from the outset that the Empire Trilogy is written with a high level of literary self-reflexivity and playfulness which are crucial aspects of Farrell's ironic and critical representation of the British overseas. Early readers tended to consider Farrell as a conventional novelist who had chosen to eschew the vogue for novelistic experimentation in the 1960s and early 1970s in favour of conventional fictional modes. According to Neil McEwan, Farrell ‘accepts the older conventions of modem prose narrative and believes they reflect what we normally experience’. More recently (and, to my mind, more accurately), critics have shown that this view is maybe mistaken, and have suggested that the Empire Trilogy's literary self-consciousness and generic playfulness are very similar to the characteristics of ‘postmodem’ fiction, especially the tendency towards parody. Coupled with Farrell's continuing delight in bizarre and unexpected metaphors, which we considered in the previous chapter, his playful attitude to literary genre contributes to the increasingly complex role of humour in his novels.