The Siege Of Krishnapur: Winner of the Booker Prize (W&N Essentials)

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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. The siege of the fictional town of Krishnapur that Farrell describes was explicitly based on the real experiences of British subjects during the Indian rebellion of 1857. (More commonly know as " the Indian Mutiny", a semantic minefield that gives a measure of the kind of territory Farrell was charging into.) 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. The fact that it didn’t win the Best of Booker still rankles. Midnight’s Children was probably a worthy winner – but I think I’d choose The Siege Of Krishnapur. It’s also notable that Farrell didn’t make the recent international critics’ list of the best 100 British novels, even though CS Lewis did. And if The Siege Of Krishnapur isn’t better than The Chronicles Of Narnia, I’m a talking lion with a messiah complex. Even the otherwise reliable Robert McCrum left it out of his top 100. The book opens in the days leading up to the rebellion. Native Indians oppose their British rulers' recent decision to take up rifles, a move seen as a violation of the Indians' religious beliefs. Discord and dissent begin to stir through the town of Krishnapur.

Hopkins is one of the few who recognises the dangers of the Indian Rebellion elsewhere. He is warned when chapatis start appearing in strange places – his in-tray, for example. Others have had this, both in Krishnapur and elsewhere in India. Hopkins see it as a threat, while others do not. He arranges for defensive walls to be built around the compound. Charles Sturridge scripted a film version of Troubles made for British television in 1988 and directed by Christopher Morahan. What you and I object to is the emptiness of the life behind all these objects, their materialism in other words. Objects are useless by themselves. How pathetic they are compared with noble feelings! What a poor and limited world they reveal beside the world of the eternal soul!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. 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. 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. These complaints culminated in Indian soldiers turning on their British officers, creating a rebellion that flared all across India. Thousands of British subjects were killed, including noncombatant women and children. In reprisal, tens of thousands of Indians were killed, some in direct acts of vengeance (many mutineers being shot from cannons), others from the resulting famine and disease. Suffice to say, it was a traumatic upheaval. The effete poet is George Fleury. He has come to India to visit his mother’s grave (she had died twenty years previously), to accompany his sister, Miriam, recently widowed and to write a book describing the advances that civilization had made in India under the Company rule, something neither he nor Farrell believe in.

This is the third book i’ve read recently in which a particular population has a collective delusion of grandeur. Why, that could never happen to us! - while the sense of impending doom grows. We are invincible! Superior! Civilized! The creepy similarity of the East Prussian Germans in Jan. 1945, the Nazis lulled by the cooperative inhabitants of the Channel Islands during their occupation, and now the English colonists in West Bengal ignoring the imminent Sepoy mutiny of 1857. Evocative of the current: “I don’t need a mask, or a vaccination, or to change anything about my life...this is just a wee flu, and dammit, I want a haircut!” assuring that the world’s humans will inevitably suffer from variants and relapses endlessly. We’re simply not too bright as a species, are we? As they always do, the British bear up and suffer along willingly. Contrarily, custom and ritual are grasped at, gleefully, as the situation goes south. Afternoon tea is served even when there's no actual tea; piping hot water in the customary teapots, cups and saucers preserves the practice. Neither the stoic countenance of the Anglican church nor the habitual stagecraft of the Raj will be denied, even to the end.On the one hand, I appreciate the value in providing the reader an immersive view into the lives of the British outpost. Farrell brilliantly portrays the way Englishmen viewed natives in colonies around the world, and occasionally juxtaposed colonial beliefs that brought out the hypocrisy in the average colonizer’s mindset. An example of this is when he shows how Europeans undermine native religious beliefs by calling them less ‘rational’ and ‘civilized,’ while simultaneously prescribing to the often equally-illogical Christian faith.

As the community finds itself in a situation that is more and more abnormal, when their lives become scarce and their daily lives more and more bizarre, I noticed that I grew to like them, and to feel for them and that I got involved in their troubles perhaps quite against my will. And then there comes the conclusion of the story, and the point where reflections are made, and the result and consequences of the experience are revealed. I guess you could see it from a political point of view, and perhaps this is also what the author intended - but I chose to look at it from a more private, human perspective - life just has to go on… J.G. Farrell's novel of the Indian Mutiny as seen from the inside; the story concerns the British trapped in a siege of their compound by their own former Indian Army members or sepoys. As the entitled representatives of the decades-old British Raj, their defense is secondary to the sheer stunned disbelief that the native population should ever even consider rising up. India, 1857—the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years. To this end Farrell is quite successful. This is whence all rating stars come. Through the drama that unveils during the long summer months of siege at the Krishnapur Residency, the confined British officials and civilians come to a slow and painful realisation of the fragile state of their own civilisation they in their hauteur thought was invincible. Primary among them is the Collector who sees the futility of the great advance of science and art when, for the sake of survival, he is forced to use artifacts as cannon fodder when ammunition runs out; Drs Dunstaple and McNab, who were proud of the superiority of modern medicine, get into a bitter conflict when they fail to agree on the most appropriate treatment for the epidemic of cholera amongst the besieged; the ladies eyeing one another in disgust when they are put together into one big hall in complete disregard for their social rank; through the figure of the cynical Padre who, instead of providing a moral-religious support, sweats over inconsequential doctrinal debate going on in Germany – a superior civilisation shown rattling at its base when for once they were forced to confront the tragedy of life at point blank. Yet despite this there is stubborn refusal to admit to the real reasons of the Rebellion. It is ingratitude – worse, indifference - on the part of the native towards the fruits of ‘civilisation’Well I hope I am not coming across as bitter or cynical here. I know there’s been progress and that everything’s so much better than it was in 1857. But probably we are just going through a period when it’s not so easy to see that. The Siege of Krishnapur sounded fascinating - a depiction of the fall of the British Empire illustrated on a small town in Northern India. The other characters are portrayed as superficial, everything exists within the vacuum created by the sieging natives and yet life goes on as normal for this section of the elite and their servants. The English behave as they do in the other books in the trilogy. – detached from reality and the native population, and convinced of their civilising role and innate superiority to other races. They talk about progress all the time. If there has been any progress in our century, it has been less in material than in spiritual matters. Think of the progress from the cynicism and materialism of our grandparents…from a Gibbon to a Keats, from a Voltaire to a Lamartine! says Fleury. I disagree,” replied Mr Rayne with a smile. “It’s only in practical matters that one may look for signs of progress. Ideas are always changing, certainly, but who’s to say that one is better than another? It is in material things that progress can be clearly seen. Rayne is an example of the shameful role of the British in the East, as he is an opium dealer, selling to the Chinese. 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 'Troubles,' the style seems to win out over the story; in SoK, the story and the style conflict, but end up producing an extraordinary novel that blends high irony, wonderful character development, fascinating description, and a deeply troubling, ultimately rewarding investigation of the mind of the colonisers. 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.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. It is apparent some blame for the revolt is due to missionary activity. Native converts seek refuge in the Residency but are turned away. The Padre cries from his pulpit denouncing a lapse in faith. Louise rescues Lucy, a fallen woman, from the town. Once seduced by an officer she is now a magnet to the besieged men. Hari had tried to lead the Maharaja's army to relieve the Residency but finds himself trapped inside with foreigners. Looting and arson mark the start of the siege.