Inspiring Older Readers
The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell
In the list of unfortunate and untimely deaths, Farrell’s in 1979 at the age of 44 must rank as one of the most tragic. Pauline Foley, a casual passer-by, witnessed the accident that took his life and Richard Woods writing in the Sunday Times in 2010, recaptures the moment:
“When at last he did achieve success, Farrell grew oppressed by the intrusions of London life and, abandoning a succession of lovers, retreated alone to Ireland to work on his next book. On August 10 he had written to his publisher, saying he hoped to deliver the work by the end of the year “barring some unforeseen disaster”.
The next day he went down to the sea. When Foley, who now lives in Surrey, saw him, he was standing on a ledge, wearing wellington boots and holding a fishing rod. Fishing was the first sport Farrell had been able to enjoy since contracting polio. The illness had left him unable to cast the rod overhead with one hand, so instead he tucked the rod under his arm and cast by twisting his body. It made balancing tricky. “It was very rough, splashing up on the rocks, but there weren’t killer waves,” recalled Foley. “He turned and waved to the boys. The boys waved back.
“He turned back, started to cast and slipped. I think it was more of a slip than the waves.” Farrell made no attempt to save himself. Foley said: “I called to him, ‘I’m coming’, and I took Sarah to the boys and tried to make them get back. My son [James, 11] got very frightened and said ‘Don’t go down there, Mummy; don’t go down there.’
“I said, ‘I’m not.’ There were some rocks a bit back. I thought if I went down there I could take off my coat, then he [Farrell] could get to me and grab it and I could pull him in.
“I started to go down there. It was just his head in the water. There was no waving, no call to me. He was just looking at me. All the time he looked at me. I don’t even want to think what he felt.”
Amid the wind and spray James was terrified and called out, desperate for her to come back. She tried to calm him and said she was just going down to the ledge.
“I took the kids back again and said, ‘Please, I won’t go in the water, I’m just going down to the ledge’.
“I started to go over again and looked across at Jim and he just went under. He looked at me and he went under.”
Farrell’s body was washed up days later.”
What Farrell left behind as a legacy is a small collection of novels that grow increasingly well-regarded with each passing year. His early novels get relatively little attention in comparison to the trilogy of works that make up his reflections on the British experience of Empire and, perhaps more accurately, the loss of Empire – Troubles (1970), The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and Singapore Grip (1978). The Siege Of Krishnapur won the Booker prize in the year of its publication and in 2010 Troubles was awarded the so-called ‘lost Booker’ award for 1970 ( a year when the award was mired in controversy over qualification rules).
This is not a trilogy of books by chronology but by theme and so it makes no real difference in which order they are read. I haven’t yet got around to either of the others but I’ve now read TSOK three times and with each reading a little bit more of the novel’s complexity unfolds itself.
Broadly based on the historical documents that describe the real experiences of those who lived through the Siege of Lucknow during the events usually described as the Indian Mutiny or Rebellion of 1857, Farrell’s novel isn’t an attempt to reconstruct an historical event but an imaginative mining and exploration of history in order to examine a set of much bigger issues.
What Farrell produces is a novel that uses the weapons of absurdity and horror to lay bare the decadence and mule-headed prejudice of everything Empire came to represent. The filth, squalor and suffering that he so accurately and graphically describes grows to be a metaphor of the British body politic in India and we see it decaying before our eyes.
The British defence of the fictitious Krishnapur allows Farrell to create a moated or walled community that enables an examination of Victorian social mores and ideas to be scrutinised and judged. So during the course of the siege issues such as gender relationships, sexual morality, religion, medicine and ‘race’ all get debated or exposed to the sunlight. The sense of certainty and superiority implicit and explicit in the behaviour of the British towards the Indian community is unveiled and set starkly before us.
This is an Empire, a regime, in inevitable decline not just because of its reprehensible actions (they’re so proud of their thriving opium trade) but because of the deep-rooted and structural prejudice and sense of entitlement that pervades everything they do. There is a fundamental absurdity in the way individuals behave that hinges on the darkly comic – the Padre for example who during the height of battle still wants to debate theology with all and sundry in order to ‘prove’ the existence of God and of sin. Or the surreal medical debate that takes place between the two doctors in the redoubt over the most appropriate way to treat cholera as those around them are dying.
Sam Jordison writing in The Guardian in 2015 mounts one of the most enthusiastic advocacies of Farrell’s book, arguing for it as one of the very great novels of the 20th century and the more I read it the more I’m inclined to agree with his assessment. I’ll leave the last words with Jordison here because I think he makes a concise case for why, if you haven’t already, you should go out and buy this book, close the front door and read it from cover to cover.
“Farrell pulls off the impressive trick of not only making us feel like we are inside this struggling garrison but also of showing us (as Elizabeth Bowen put it) “yesterday reflected in today’s consciousness”. Even though we never emerge from the Victorian headspace, this becomes a book about the folly of colonialism and the illusions of civilisation, as well as one about survival in impossible circumstances.”
Terry Potter
April 2019