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J. G. FARRELL (1935–1979) was born with a caul, long considered a sign of good fortune. Academically and athletically gifted, Farrell grew up in England and Ireland. In 1956, during his first term at Oxford, he suffered what seemed a minor injury on the rugby pitch. Within days, however, he was diagnosed with polio, which nearly killed him and left him permanently weakened. Farrell’s early novels, which include The Lung and A Girl in the Head, have been overshadowed by his Empire Trilogy—Troubles, the Booker Prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur, and The Singapore Grip (all three are published by NYRB Classics). In early 1979, Farrell bought a farmhouse in Bantry Bay on the Irish coast. “I’ve been trying to write,” he admitted, “but there are so many competing interests—the prime one at the moment is fishing off the rocks..... Then a colony of bees has come to live above my back door and I’m thinking of turning them into my feudal retainers.” On August 11, Farrell was hit by a wave while fishing and was washed out to sea. His body was found a month later. A biography of J. G. Farrell, J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer by Lavinia Greacen, was published by Bloomsbury in 1999.

DEREK MAHON was born in Belfast in 1941, studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Sorbonne, and has held journalistic and academic appointments in London and New York. He has received numerous awards, including the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Poetry Prize, the Irish Academy of Letters Award, the Scott Moncrieff and Aristeion translation prizes, and Lannan and Guggenheim fellowships. His Collected Poems were published in 1999 and Harbour Lights, a volume of new poetry, is forthcoming in 2005.

THE SINGAPORE GRIP

J. G. FARRELL

Introduction by

DEREK MAHON

New York Review Books

New York

Contents

Cover

Biographical Note

Title Page

Introduction

The Singapore Grip

Map

Dedication

Author's Note

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six

Afterword

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Copyright and More Information

Introduction

Jim Farrell, the finest novelist of recent times, drowned in Bantry Bay on Saturday 11 August 1979, at the age of forty-four. Two days later eighteen more lives were lost when gale-force winds broke up the Fastnet Race; but Jim wasn’t sailing, he was fishing. He had bought a house near Kilcrohane, County Cork, only five months before and turned into the complete angler in a matter of weeks. Though born in England, he spent much of his youth in Ireland and returned constantly in his thoughts. Like Brendan Archer in Troubles he had left the love of his life here and never quite severed the umbilical cord.

He traveled a great deal, latterly in India and Southeast Asia to research The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip—though his research was singular in that he drafted the novels first and made his field trips afterward to confirm or revise the background he had read up or imagined at home in London. He traveled in time too, of course, and his evocation of the Raj at the time of the Indian Mutiny must be one of the best there is. One of the remarkable things about the work is his uncanny sense of period, his eye for the clinching detail—an elephant’s-foot wastepaper basket in Troubles, or the contents of Prince Hari’s room in The Siege:

Near a fireplace of marble inlaid with garnets, lapis lazuli and agate, the Maharajah’s son sat on a chair constructed entirely of antlers, eating a boiled egg and reading Blackwood’s Magazine. Beside the chair a large cushion on the floor still bore the impression of where he had been sitting a moment earlier. He preferred squatting on the floor to the discomfort of chairs but feared that his English visitors might regard this as backward.

Out of context this reads, I realize, rather like a racist joke; but Jim was no racist. On the contrary, he is one of the few English (or Anglo-Irish) writers about the British Empire who can see events through the eyes of the colonized, certainly in The Siege and the Grip, where the submerged life of the Chinese