Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [1]
The Major raised the binoculars and gazed once more at the young man on the rock jetty, wondering what he was saying to the crowd. Behind him as he spoke great towering breakers would build up; a solid wall of water as big as a house would mount over his gesticulating arms, hang there above him for an instant as if about to engulf him, then crash around him in a torrent of foam. “He looks like a wild young fellow,” the Major said as he handed the binoculars back. Before turning away he watched another wave tower over the young Irishman, hang for a moment, and at last topple to boil impotently around his feet. It was, after all, only the lack of perspective that made it seem he would be swept away.
Rereading that, I’m aware of an uncanny parallel between the “wild young fellow,” presumably a Sinn Féin organizer, who wouldn’t be swept away, and his creator, who would; and I’m reminded of some remarks, in a piece Jim wrote on his early reading, about the “hallucinating clarity of image” he admired in Conrad and Richard Hughes. He talks too about Loti’s Pêcheur d’Islande which he read at school:
I realised with surprise that I was becoming intensely interested in this story of Breton fishermen and their difficulties .... So powerful an impression did this book make on me that even today there are certain phenomena for which an expression of Loti’s will alone suffice. A certain wintry light over the sea, for example, still conjures up Loti’s lumière blafarde. I had no idea then, nor have I now, of the precise meaning of blafard. In my own mind it bears such perfect witness as it is, that to find its accepted meaning might prove an inconvenience.
Well, the Oxford French Dictionary gives “pale, pallid, wan, sallow, dull, leaden.” But of course Jim is perfectly right: none of them is sufficiently blafard, with its edge of wildness, insanity even.
There was nothing obviously wild, much less insane, about the man I knew. Eccentric, yes; outspoken too. Adopting John Berger’s precedent, he continued the practice, now alas in abeyance, whereby the recipient of a Booker Prize should bite the feeding hand in no uncertain terms. Presented with his winning check for The Siege of Krishnapur, he made a short speech of thanks in his mild, wandering voice and took the opportunity to criticize conditions on the Booker McConnell plantations in the West Indies.
“We devote too much time to satisfying the ego, time which could be better spent in fruitful speculation or in the service of the senses; in any case, owning things one doesn’t need for some primary purpose, and that includes almost everything, has gone clean out of fashion. I’m sorry to have to break this news of the death of materialism so bluntly; I’m afraid it will come as a shock to some of your readers.” Thus spake Jim when, an unlikely fashion journalist, I interviewed him for Vogue in 1974. Ascetic epicurean, gregarious solitary, aristocrat of the spirit, he was then entering upon the late, disinterested “Marxist” phase (though he was never really a Marxist) which would issue in his most ambitious work, The Singapore Grip, with its clear-eyed depiction of economic imperialism at work in Southeast Asia and the Far East.
But there’s an intimation of something else too in his hip Vogue prophecy. When, at his mother’s suggestion, my wife and I visited the Kilcrohane house in 1981, we found on his desk and bookshelves Japanese dictionaries and Buddhist texts which seemed to indicate the way his thoughts were tending during his last year, and even to reveal an important, if barely visible, aspect of his nature; for his early brush with death and subsequent singularity had developed in him a mystical strain, one which expressed itself in impatience with London and withdrawal to the silence of