It's Ireland in 1919. Major Archer, his nerves shattered after his experience in the trenches, has arrived at the Majestic Hotel in County Wexford to claim his fiancee Angela, who he barely remembers, having met her, and kissed her briefly, one afternoon when on leave in Brighton. The hotel is huge, gloomy, crumbling and apparently deserted and there is no sign of Angela or her father Edward Spencer, the hotel's owner, so the Major is reduced to seeking out a room for himself. The room is dirty, there are no sheets, and a peculiar smell proves to be a rotting, maggot-infested sheep's head which has somehow found its way into the bedside cabinet. At last he finds Angela, looking tired, and older than he had remembered, in the Palm Court,
a vast, shadowy cavern in which dusty chairs stood in silent, empty groups, just visible here and there amid the gloomy foliage. For the palms had completely run riot, shooting out of their wooden tubs (some of which had cracked open to trickle little cones of black soil onto the tiled floor). Here and there between the tables beds of oozing mould supported banana and rubber plants, hairy ferns, elephant grass and creepers that dangled from above like emerald intestines.
The grand old days of the Majestic are long gone, and its only regular guests are a troop of impoverished old ladies, attended by disaffected servants. Edward Spencer hates and fears the Irish, who he sees as little more than animals, fair game to be shot at if they impinge on his property. Staunchly Protestant, he also hates and fears Catholicism, though he seems extremely (to the Major, worryingly) friendly with beautiful, skittish Sarah Devlin, the Catholic daughter of the bank manager, with whom the Major is soon desperately in love.
Of course the rapid and terrifying decay of the hotel parallels the decay of British rule in Ireland. The novel is punctuated with news reports both from around the country and from elsewhere in the world -- unrest seems to be rife just about everywhere. Angela's ninety year old blind grandmother takes to wearing a leather holster round her ancient waist, and by the end Edward insists that the place settings in the dining room should include a revolver beside every plate. Meanwhile the Major moves from room to room seeking some degree of comfort, the roof of the servants' quarters falls in and the servants are forced to move into the guest bedrooms (much to the horror of the old ladies), Edward's teenage twin daughters are expelled from school and run riot among any available young men, Edward's crops are burned and his beloved piglets murdered, a grand ball ends in disaster, leaving the caterers who have come to provide breakfast standing forlornly on the deserted terrace surrounded by rapidly cooling dishes of bacon, eggs and kidneys...
And of course everything ends disastrously and tragically. But in this truly magnificent novel, disaster and tragedy are equally mixed with frequently horrified laughter. The Major, handsome, humourless, trying to keep things together at the Majestic and in the family in the face of overwhelming odds, is lovable and sad, his unrequited passion for Sarah almost threatening his reason. Edward meanwhile, increasingly mad, rages through the house like a whirlwind, sometimes disappearing for days at a time to carry out his scientific experiments -- one of which involves threatening his ancient butler with death in order to measure the subsequent absence of saliva in his mouth.
It's interesting to compare this novel with The Glass Palace, which I wrote about a few days ago. Both are essentially political, anti-colonialist novels. But while in Ghosh's book the politics swamp the characters, here the balance seems to me to be perfect -- the political themes are perfectly clear, but they are mirrored through characters who, though extreme to the point of grotesqueness in some cases, are entirely believable and strangely sympathetic.
As I'm sure you know, this novel was the winner of the Lost Booker Prize this year -- an administrative glitch having excluded from the Booker all the novels published in 1970. JG Farrell went on to win the Booker three years later with The Siege of Krishnapoor, which I am going to read soon. Sadly he died in a fishing accident a few years later, just four months after he had moved to County Cork.
