“Having a place to fall into”
Farrell’s theory of history—that events matter but they are best represented obliquely or ironically—is part and parcel of his theory of the novel. Reflecting on his previous work and anticipating the book that would become Troubles, Farrell wrote in his diary in February 1967 about the need ‘to think more deeply about plots, about events, about binding books together with some sort of homogeneity’ and, a few weeks later, about the need for a form, so that ‘things can begin to fall into place, having a place to fall into.’ It wasn’t until he took a trip to Block Island and came across the burned ruins of the Ocean View Hotel that Farrell realized the ‘place’ he needed to structure his book around could be literal. Farrell finally had a way to solve the problem that had bedeviled him—the need for something at the center of a novel that ‘must be substantial like the stone in a peach and … must exist before one can ever begin to start thinking constructively.’
—from a essay on J.G. Farrell’s Troubles in Open Letters Monthly by Dorian Stuber. The “place” referred to is the setting of most of the novel, the decrepit Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough, Ireland.
