The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [390]
Lastly, I am most grateful to Mrs Anthony Storr for letting me see family letters relating to the Mutiny. I wish also to acknowledge my debt to Professor Owen Chadwick’s work on the Victorian Church and to M. A. Crowther’s Religious Controversy of the Mid-Nineteenth Century, and to the historians, too numerous to mention individually, on whom I have relied for the facts of Victorian life to support my fiction.
This is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1973 by J. G. Farrell
Introduction copyright © 2004 by Pankaj Mishra
All rights reserved.
Cover photograph: Felice Beato, “Interior of Secundra Baug after the slaughter of 2,000 rebels by the 93rd Highlanders. The Punjab Regt.,” 1858; cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Farrell, J.G. (James Gordon), 1935–
The siege of Krishnapur / J.G. Farrell; introduction by Pankaj Mishra.
p. cm.—(New York Review Books classics)
1. India—History—Sepoy Rebellion, 1857–1858—Fiction. 2. Sieges—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.
PR6056.A75S57 2004
823'.914—dc22
2004011934
The Singapore Grip
J.G. Farrell
Introduction by Derek Mahon
New York Review Books
New York
Contents
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
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 community is explored sympathetically. The exception, curiously, is Troubles, where everything is seen through the eyes, or binoculars, of the Big House characters; and although the “native Irish” are treated affectionately, they remain oddly baffling to the