“In those days the Majestic was still standing in Kilnalough at the very end of a slim peninsula covered with dead pines leaning here and there at odd angles.”
This 1970 novel won the “Lost” Booker prize where books from that year were ineligible for rules reasons. And so this won against Shirley Hazzard’s The Bay at Noon, Nina Bawden’s The Birds on the Trees, Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven, Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, and Patrick White’s The Vivisector, a tough crowd to win against in part because forty years on the retrospective weight of the the year grew.
The novel takes place primarily in Ireland in the late 1910s and early 1920s and follows an English major who returns from The Great War, and arrives in Ireland to follow up on a fledgling romance with a woman named Angela, whom he corresponded with during the war and met once. Angela Spencer is Anglo-Irish, and her father Edward owns a large hotel where the family lives; Edward is vehemently anti-Catholic. Major Archer is not actually sure what the deal is with his relationship but when he arrives it really seems like things are moving toward marriage quickly, seemingly out of his control. But before too much time Angela dies from an undisclosed illness, and Archer feels somewhat relieved actually, and turns his affection toward Sarah, a woman from the town who is also ill. But he returns to England for the time being. Like many the English colonial, he feels pulled back toward the colonies, and returns to Ireland in part to reconnect with his previous acquaintances and of course see about Sarah. While he’s there he finds completely alien to the country and cannot make sense of the sectarian politics and believes, again like many a colonial figure, that his Englishness can singularly sort through it as he makes his advances.
We are with Archer in this book almost exclusively and the confusion and obliviousness he experiences becomes ours as the novel barrels forth.