Seige of Krishnapur (Farrell)

The Siege of Krishnapur 
J.G. Farrell, 1973
New York Review of Books (Classic)
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781590170922


Summary
J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur is both a gripping tale of the siege of a remote British outpost during the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and a fascinating, and blisteringly comic novel of ideas. Farrell’s picture of the British Empire in crisis raises questions with a bearing on contemporary conflicts between East and West.

In 1857, Indian soldiers in the British army—known as sepoys—rebelled against their colonial overlords, and serious conflict broke out in the northern half of the subcontinent. In Farrell’s novel, the British inhabitants of the fictional town of Krishnapur ignore rumors of unrest only to find themselves under siege by the rebels.

Trapped in a dwindling number of buildings, subject to repeated attack, and suffering both from sickness and the oppressive heat of summer, the British community soon finds itself under threat from within, too, as the simple certainties of superiority and invulnerability that have sustained them and the British Empire begin to crumble.

Farrell’s characters, from the local priest and doctor to the young men and women who have come east to make their fortune or marry, are shown responding to this challenge in unexpected ways. Especially interesting and sympathetic is the character of Mr Hopkins, the administrative head, or Collector, of Krishnapur. In him, Farrell offers an unforgettable picture of a decent man enduring the death of his ideals.

With its many memorable characters, riveting battle scenes, and tragicomic appreciation of the ironies of history, this masterful novel—winner of the Booker Prize in 1973—will keep readers on the edge of their seats. (From the publisher.)

This is the second book in Farrell's Empire Trilogy; the first is Troubles (1970). The Singapore Grip (1978) is the third.

Author Bio
• Birth—January 25, 1935
• Where—Liverpool, England, UK
• Death—August 11, 1979
• Where—Bantry Bay, County Cork, Ireland
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Booker Prize; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Lost Man Booker Prize


James Gordon Farrell was a Liverpool-born novelist of Irish descent. He gained prominence for a series of novels known as the Empire Trilogy (Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip), which deal with the political and human consequences of British colonial rule.

Farrell's career abruptly ended when he drowned in Ireland at the age of 44, swept to his death in a storm. "Had he not sadly died so young,” Salman Rushdie said in 2008, "there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary."

Troubles received the 1971 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and The Siege of Krishnapur received the 1973 Booker Prize. In 2010 Troubles was retrospectively awarded the Lost Man Booker Prize, created to recognise works published in 1970. Troubles and its fellow shortlisted works had not been open for consideration that year due to a change in the eligibility rules.

Early life and education
Farrell, born in Liverpool into a family of Anglo-Irish background, was the second of three sons. His father, William Farrell, had worked as an accountant in Bengal, and in 1929 he married Prudence Josephine Russell, a former receptionist and secretary to a doctor. From the age of 12 he attended Rossall public school in Lancashire.

After World War II, the Farrells moved to Dublin, and from this point on Farrell spent much time in Ireland: this, perhaps combined with the popularity of Troubles, leads many to treat him as an Irish writer. After leaving Rossall, he taught in Dublin and also worked for some time on Distant Early Warning Line in the Canadian Arctic.

In 1956, he went to study at Brasenose College, Oxford; while there he contracted polio. This would leave him partially crippled, and the disease would be prominent in his works. In 1960 he left Oxford with Third-class honours in French and Spanish and went to live in France, where he taught at a lycee.

Early works
Farrell published his first novel, A Man From Elsewhere, in 1963. Set in France, it shows the clear influence of French existentialism. The story follows Sayer, who is a journalist for a communist paper, as he tries to find skeletons in Regan's closet. Regan is a dying novelist who is about to be awarded an important Catholic literary prize. The book mimics the fight between the two leaders of French existentialism: Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The two argue about existentialism: the position that murder can be vindicated as an expedient in overthrowing tyranny (Sartre) versus the stance that there are no ends that justify unjust means (Camus). Bernard Bergonzi reviewed it in the New Statesman in the 20 September 1963 issue and said, "Many first novels are excessively autobiographical, but A Man from Elsewhere suffers from the opposite fault of being a cerebral construct, dreamed up out of literature and the contemporary French cinema." Farrell himself came to dislike the book.

Two years after this came The Lung, in which Farrell returned to his real-life trauma of less than a decade earlier: the main character Martin Sands contracts polio and has to spend a long period in hospital. It has been noted that it is somewhat modeled after Farrell, but it is modeled more after Geoffrey Firmin from Malcolm Lowry 1947 novel, Under the Volcano. The anonymous reviewer for The Observer wrote that "Mr. Farrell gives the pleasantly solid impression of really having something to write about" and one for The Times Literary Supplement that "Mr. Farrell's is an effective, potent brew, compounded of desperation and a certain wild hilarity."

In 1967, he published A Girl in the Head. The protagonist, the impoverished Polish count Boris Slattery, lives in the fictional English seaside town of Maidenhair Bay, in the house of the Dongeon family (which is believed to be modelled after V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas). His marriage to Flower Dongeon is decaying. His companion is Dr. Cohen, who is a dying alcoholic. Boris also has sex with an underaged teenager, June Furlough. He also fantasizes about Ines, a Swedish summer guest, who is the "girl in the head." Boris is believed to be modelled after Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Like its two predecessors, the book met only middling critical and public reaction.

Empire Trilogy
Troubles (1970) tells the comic yet melancholy tale of an English Major, Brendan Archer, who in 1919 goes to County Wexford in Ireland to meet the woman he believes he may be engaged to marry. From the crumbling Majestic Hotel at Kilnalough, he watches Ireland's fight for independence from Britain. Farrell started writing this book while on a Harkness Fellowship in the United States and finished it in a tiny flat in Knightsbridge, London. He won a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for the novel, and with the prize money travelled to India to research his next novel.

Farrell's next book The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and his last completed work The Singapore Grip (1978) both continue his story of the collapse of British colonial power. The former deals with the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Inspired by historical events such as the sieges of Cawnpore and Lucknow, the novel is set in the fictional town of Krishnapur, where a besieged British garrison succeeds in holding out for four months against an army of native sepoys, in the face of enormous suffering, before being relieved.

The third of the novels, The Singapore Grip, centres upon the Japanese capture of the British colonial city of Singapore in 1942, while also exploring at some length the economics and ethics of colonialism at the time, as well as the economic relationship between developed and Third World countries at the time that Farrell was writing.

The three novels are in general linked only thematically, although Archer, a character in Troubles, reappears in The Singapore Grip. The protagonist of Farrell's unfinished novel, The Hill Station, is Dr McNab, introduced in The Siege of Krishnapur; this novel and its accompanying notes make the series a quartet.

When The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker Prize in 1973, Farrell used his acceptance speech to attack the sponsors, the Booker Group, for their business involvement in the agricultural sector in the Third World. In this vein, some readers have found Farrell's critique of colonialism and capitalism in his subsequent novel The Singapore Grip to be heavy-handed, although those new to the book after the crash of 2008 might not find it so.

Death
In 1979, Farrell decided to quit London to take up residence on the Sheep's Head peninsula in southwestern Ireland. A few months later he was found drowned on the coast of Bantry Bay, after falling in from rocks while angling. He was 44.

He is buried in the cemetery of St. James's Church of Ireland in Durrus. The manuscript library at Trinity College, Dublin holds his papers: Papers of James Gordon Farrell (1935–1979). TCD MSS 9128-60.

Legacy
Ronald Binns described Farrell's colonial novels as "probably the most ambitious literary project conceived and executed by any British novelist in the 1970s."

In the 1984 novel Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, Vinnie Miner, the protagonist, reads a Farrell novel on her flight from New York to London. In the 1991 novel The Gates of Ivory by Margaret Drabble, the writer Stephen Cox is modelled on Farrell.

Charles Sturridge scripted a film version of Troubles made for British television in 1988 and directed by Christopher Morahan.

Quotes
Farrell said to George Brock in an interview for The Observer Magazine, "the really interesting thing that's happened during my lifetime has been the decline of the British Empire." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/12/2015.)

Book Reviews
Suspense and subtlety, humour and horror, the near-neighbourliness of heroism and insanity: it is rare to find such divergent elements being controlled in one hand and being raced, as it were, in one yoke. But Farrell manages just this here: his imaginative insight and technical virtuosity combine to produce a novel of quite outstanding quality.
Times (UK)

The magnificient passages of action in The Siege of Krishnapur, its gallery of characters, its unashamedly detailed and fascinating dissertations on cholera, gunnery, phrenology, the prodigal inventiveness of its no doubt also well-documented scenes should satisfy the most exacting and voracious reader. For a novel to be witty is one thing, to tell a good story is another, to be serious is yet another, but to be all three is surely enough to make it a masterpiece.
John Spurling - New Statesman

[A] masterpiece as unclassifiable as Giuseppe Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard or Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, The Blue Flower. A historical novel, a comedy of manners, an intellectual history, an evocation of scene: It is all of these. But it is the inimitable combination of these ingredients that gives the book its perculiar savor.
Columbus Dispatch

Discussion Questions
1. Why does the Collector idealize the Great Exhibition? What ideals does it embody? How does the authorial voice serve to put into perspective the Collector’s sanguine faith in these ideals? What final verdict on the Great Exhibition do the events of the novel leave us with?

2. How are women—both individually and as a group—characterized? How do the men see them? In the last days of the siege, two of the women have become integral to the survival of the community: Lucy Hughes has proven herself to be skilled at making rifle cartridges and Louise Dunstaple works tirelessly to help Dr. McNab in the hospital. How do these actions change your perception of each of them? Have the women changed significantly, or now, at the end, have we simply been offered a different view of them?

3. Farrell’s novel is richly sensory. How does he use sensory details—particularly auditory and olfactory details—to create atmosphere and build tension? Choose several passages that you felt were especially vivid and explain why.

4. The British compound acts as a petri dish, in which prevailing ideas about class, race, sex,and religion are enacted within a small, closed community. Given the events that unfold, what conclusions can be drawn about the state of the larger society? Give examples of how Victorian social hierarchies are acted out amongst the besieged community.

5. How does George Fleury evolve as the novel progresses? Why does he become more appealing to Louise Dunstaple—whom he later marries—when before the siege she had no interest in him at all? Compare Fleury and Louise’s brother, Harry. Why is Fleury often in opposition to so many people in Krishnapur, especially Hari, the Collector, and the Padre?

6. The novel’s humor springs from the mocking and ironic portrayal of its characters. Describe the tone of The Siege of Krishnapur. Are the characters nuanced individuals, or are they types? Does the novel’s irony and humor diminish our ability to feel sympathy for them?

7. How would you characterize Lieutenant Cutter? What qualities of the British in India does he typify?

8. Characters in Farrell’s novel often remain stubbornly committed to their beliefs, even inspite of  convincing evidence to the contrary. Discuss the argument about cholera treatmentbetween Dr. Dunstaple and Dr. McNab. Why is Dr. Dunstaple so unwilling to reconsider his point of view? What arguments are ultimately compelling to the community and why is this alarming? What broader inferences about British society in India can be drawn from the argument between the two men?

9. "The Collector was astonished by how little the Prime Minister had changed during his month of captivity.... The siege had simply made no impression on him whatsoever" [p. 226]. Why has the siege had such little effect on the Prime Minister? Why has it had a greater impact on Hari?

10. Do you think that Hari is a convincing character? What ideas and values of European culture does he cherish? Why did he and Fleury not see eye to eye when the latter visited the Maharajah’s palace? Why, even in spite of his humiliating imprisonment, does Hari remain fond of the Collector?

11. Many years after the siege, the Collector, a former avid proponent of the arts, says, "Culture is a sham. It’s a cosmetic painted on life by rich people to conceal its ugliness" [p. 343]. How and why have the Collector’s ideas changed so radically? What are his final thoughts on leaving India and how has he come to them.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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