This is by J.G. Farrell (1935-79), and it was published in 1973 (when it won the Booker Prize). I picked it up because it was the latest group read for Simon Haisell's Footnotes & Tangents, whose journey through Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light I'd really enjoyed last year. And why were THEY reading it? Well, it's one of the historical novels that Mantel herself recommended. Asked to name her favourite Booker Prize-winning novel, she replied: "I go all the way back to ... The Siege of Krishnapur, which showed us that the historical novel need not be solemn." In a 2012 Newsweek article, she describes it like this: "An idiosyncratic masterpiece, wise and richly comic, set in India in 1857 in a besieged town garrisoned by the British. Original and endlessly entertaining, it repays repeated readings."

As I'm now repeatedly finding, Haisell's guidance, and the group's enthusiastic and thoughtful comments, make for a great reading experience.


J.G. Farrell

My only previous outing with Farrell was The Singapore Grip, which I'd liked. I didn't realize at the time, though, that it was the last in his Empire Trilogy, in which he set out to portray "people trying to adjust themselves to abrupt changes in their civilisation". The Siege of Krishnapur is the second in that trio.

Farrell was born in Liverpool, but moved with his family to Ireland after WWII. He taught in France for a while; won a fellowship to travel to the US; and made a lengthy visit to India to research the background for this novel. He drowned in an accident off County Cork in 1979, at the tragically young age of 44.


There are multiple copies of the book available at Internet Archive. I read the one with the truly terrible cover...

Krishnapur is a fictional town in northern India, and the account Farrell gives us in the novel is closely modelled on the siege of Lucknow, where the British were corralled in the Residency for a full six months during the 1857 Indian rebellion against the British East India Company. Documents about Lucknow (many now available online) form the basis for Farrell's story. In his Afterword, he notes: "Those familiar with the history of the time will recognize countless details in this novel of actual events taken from the mass of diaries, letters and memoirs written by eyewitnesses, in some cases with the words of the witness only slightly modified."


Lucknow, 2017

But as Sam Goodman points out, in a fascinating article, this is history from the vantage-point of the 1970s. Farrell's book was written when Britain's empire was fast receding into the realms of memory, and concurrently, the historical novel, often nostalgic in tone, was gaining new popularity. Any yen for sentimentalism, however, will not be rewarded by Farrell's work, which ruthlessly probes the effects of empire on the imperialists themselves. This interrogation -- often cutting to the bone with its razor-sharp gaze -- is carried out in several ways.

The two doctors who appear in the novel, for example, conduct a lively debate about the origin and best treatment of cholera (a vital issue during the siege). One ends up dying, very possibly because of his determination to prove that he is right. Farrell suggests, says Goodman, "that to continue to accept the rose-tinted, traditional view of Empire is as dangerous as belief in the effectiveness of mustard poultices as a cure for bacterial infection". Phrenology, the validity of which one or two of the characters are convinced of, is another vehicle that encourages us to be sceptical about the state of our knowledge at any given time. By mocking this pseudo-science, "Farrell is inviting his readers to examine more closely what contemporary history in the 1970s was doing to the record of British Imperialism and its potential effect on their own adherences or beliefs". In the 2020s, when we seem to have regressed in so many areas, we'd do well to heed his warning.



The book also drips with irony. So many volumes in the Residence library, and yet the British never seem to learn anything; so many collected statistics (seen as "the leg-irons to be clapped on the thugs of ignorance and superstition which strangled Truth in lonely byways"), and yet in one of the early burials, they can't even be sure which corpse is which... Led by the Padre, who becomes increasingly more unbalanced, the British colonizers blithely pray for God's judgement on "covetous persons and extortioners and them that grind the faces of the poor", not connecting any of those labels with the British operations in India.

Then we have a description of "the Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice, a bas-relief in marble by the window; it was here that the angle of the light gave most life to the brutish expression of Ignorance at the moment of being disembowelled by Truth's sabre, and yet emphasised at the same time how hopelessly Prejudice, on the point of throwing a net over Truth, had become enmeshed in its own toils." Farrell never labours anything. It's up to readers to figure out where the "Spirit of Science" had taken these characters; wonder how "Ignorance" felt about the uninvited awakening; and ask themselves where most of the "Prejudice" lies in this novel, in which the ruling British white male seems to inhabit a universe where complete ignorance of anyone else in any other category means that those others are simply regarded as inferior beings.

Vokins is our representative white working-class male, and his sotto voce comments often put him at odds with the higher-ups, who regularly overestimate his desire to sacrifice himself for Britain and its bulging-eyed queen. We have several feisty women among our characters. One grows perceptibly, from pre-siege flightiness to remarkable courage under fire; another is frankly "tired of womanhood... [and] of having to adjust to other people's ideas of what a woman should be". Yet this mostly goes unnoticed. The Collector, a major figure in the novel, whose task it is to direct the defence of the Residency, cannot see women as anything but childlike: "Women are weak, we shall always have to take care of them, just as we shall always have to take care of the natives."

Ah, yes, the "natives"... British ignorance, determinedly practised, particularly applies to them. The novel illustrates this quite brilliantly right from the beginning, as we are shown a landscape through the eyes of a traveller, who sounds very plausible, but turns out to be totally deluded, an utterly unreliable guide. What he (it's probably he) thinks is Krishnapur isn't. It's a city of the dead. What he thinks is deserted plain, with nothing distinguishable in it, is full of life. But he doesn't understand any of it. None of the British characters is remotely interested in understanding India or Indians.


This advert for Pears soap says it all...

It didn't use to be so. Earlier generations of Brits in India were fascinated -- intoxicated, almost -- by the culture, as I knew from reading William Dalrymple's White Mughals many years ago. There was an era when cross-cultural learning was alive and well between English guests and Indian hosts. Afterwards, under the influence of far too many short-sighted people, the curtain closed on this period, and the barren imperialist mindset of white superiority took control.

The Siege of Krishnapur is sometimes criticized for focusing too much on white people, and dialling almost to silence the voices of the Indian population. But I think Farrell was wise to do it this way. Any attempt to see through the eyes of the locals must surely have ended in failure. Far better to write through the eyes of the British -- who are, after all, his principal targets, and whom he sends up mercilessly.

Symbolism, laid on with a trowel (in keeping with the proclivities of the Victorians), plays a key role in his critique. The statues of Plato and Socrates end up being positioned as protection for the cannon: "Now the giant heads..., each with an expression of penetrating wisdom carved on his white features, surveyed the river and the melon beds beyond." Eventually, when the besieged are desperately short of ammunition, fragments of marble chipped from The Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice are loaded into the cannon, along with teaspoons, fish-knives, and sugar-tongs. At the very end, statue heads are also used as missiles. Shakespeare flies particularly well, we're told, on account of his bald head.

There's lots more like this. The Collector raises his eyes to the British flag, while the smells of putrefaction waft around him, and he eventually ends up struggling "with the stifling presence of the flag wrapped round him like a shroud". Worse still, extensive destruction reveals that the pillars of the Residency are not marble: There's a "guilty red core" underneath the stucco. Doesn't that say it all?

While many elements of the novel read like a pastiche of the adventure stories recounted to little British boys in the Victorian and Edwardian era, the undercurrent is deathly dark. Farrell pulls not a single punch about the effects of a siege. There is death, disease, and despair; heat, stench, and fear; and a growing lack of everything, including food, water, medicine, and ammunition. A succession of plagues hits the settlement, ranging from flying ants to cockchafer beetles. It's apocalyptic. An adventure that has gone horribly, horribly wrong.


A better cover, complete with vultures...

And yet, Farrell manages to make it incredibly funny. I know that sounds weird. It's the kind of humour that I think grows only in the British Isles, melding understatement and farce and tragedy to create a black grotesqueness that keeps you glued to the pages, horrified one minute, laughing out loud the next.

Reading some of the critique, I wonder how many people actually don't grasp the tongue-in-cheek qualities of the writing. As Ken Powell comments, "This parody is almost too well-written for its own good." Some don't seem to realize that when Farrell comments, for example, on "the apathy of the native" or his lack of enterprise, he is writing from the Victorian headspace, but with his own time (more than a quarter of a century after India's independence) looking over his shoulder, as it were. It's a gap that allows irony and reflective distance.



The two characters we keep most consistently in our sights throughout the novel are the Collector and young George Fleury.

The Collector is held in awe by the Europeans, but is moody and overbearing towards his family. He starts out as a great believer in all that was represented by the Great Exhibition of 1851. Progress, civilization, all that stuff. He's actually the first to sense danger, and Noah-like, starts to build defensive ramparts even while everyone else thinks he's being silly. He leads the defence of the Residency pretty well, but the whole business undermines his faith in anything: "From the farmyard in which his certitudes perched like fat chickens, every night of the siege, one or two were carried off in the jaws of rationalism and despair."

By the time we're two thirds through, "the fiction of happy natives being led forward along the road to civilization could not longer be sustained". The Collector, at least, has "realized that there was a whole way of life of the people in India which he would never get to know and which was totally indifferent to him and his concerns. 'The Company could pack up here tomorrow and this fellow would never notice... The British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them.' The Collector was humbled and depressed by this thought."

Fleury starts out melancholic and poetic, but is rapidly forced to shape up under the pressure of circumstance. When we first meet him, he's writing a book about "the advance of civilization in India", but he can't help wondering why people in the native states don't come and live in British India, if it's as good as he's always being told it is... Fleury is often the comic turn. He can't keep his mind on the job; he specializes in dreaming up inappropriate weapons; and he survives more by good luck than good management. But he's likeable. He it is who tumbles to "a simple fact about human nature...: nobody is superior to anyone else, he may only be better at doing a specific thing".


South Park St Cemetery, Kolkata, 2016. Fleury's mother was buried here, we're told

Fleury and the Collector are still alive when relief comes, and we meet them again, right at the end, when many years have gone by. Fleury is no longer the amiable and questioning young man we knew. He has turned into a stout, opinionated, and hectoring bore, convinced that progress and identity depend on IDEAS, which are the bedrock of society. Such mental furniture makes him the ideal empire-builder. The Collector, on the other hand, is dismissive: "Oh, ideas..." He is the one who has learned the most from the whole debacle, and he's a deeply disillusioned man. Once the great collector (small C) of objets d'art, he now believes that "culture is a sham... a cosmetic painted on life by rich people to conceal its ugliness". And his ideas of the colonial mission have changed profoundly: "Perhaps, by the very end of his life, in 1880, he had come to believe that a people, a nation, does not create itself according to its own best ideas, but is shaped by other forces, of which it has little knowledge."

***

It's certainly a very thought-provoking book. It encourages us, for a start, to think about history, the past, and historical fiction. At one point, the Padre, deeply pessimistic, challenges faith in progress by remarking: "We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for US... but what if we're only an afterglow of THEM?" Simon Haisell very aptly comments: "When we consider the past, we should not look on it as a staging post toward our present, but as a time in its own right. The dead were living once, with no knowledge of what the world would become. To return to the past, through fact or fiction, is to decentre ourselves from history: we are the after-glow; they are the fire. Put this way, this quote may be viewed as a way of orientating ourselves in historical fiction, abandoning both condescension and romantic nostalgia for the past, in search of an understanding of the past as the living and burning heart of its very own moment."


Lucknow

And yet, there is much that we can apply to the present. Towards the end of the story, the rains that have temporarily halted the onslaught ease, and the Indian spectators are back, watching what they think will be the final show, the fall of the Residence. They bring picnics: "It did not look as if this last act would take very long." In fact, it took another 90 years... A long lifetime. But the end was inevitable. The writing was on the wall.

Priyamvada Gopal writes that the echoes of the 1857 rebellion were still reverberating around the empire in 1925. Edward Thompson wondered at that time what accounted for the "granite and immovable" wall, the "unsatisfied, embittered, troublesome" attitude that made it impossible for Indians to be reconciled with the colonial power. "The answer, for Thompson, lay in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, a fountain that was ‘sending forth a steady flood of poisoned waters’: '...Right at the back of the mind of many an Indian the Mutiny flits as he talks with an Englishman -- an unavenged and unappeased ghost.'"

Shahid H. Raja also sees the rebellion as "the reference point for all subsequent historical narratives in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh".

Writing in 2007, William Dalrymple calls the events of 1857 "a bloody warning to today's imperial occupiers", reminding us: "There is much about British imperial adventures in the east at this time [1857], and the massive insurgency it provoked, which is uneasily familiar to us today... Lord Wellesley, the brother of the Duke of Wellington and governor general in India from 1798 to 1805, called his new approach the Forward Policy. But it was in effect a project for a new British century... The Forward Policy soon developed an evangelical flavour. The new conservatives wished to impose not only British laws but also western values on India. The country would be not only ruled but redeemed... The reaction to this came with the great mutiny, or as it is called in India, the first war of independence... Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, there are many echoes of the Islamic insurgencies the US fights today in Iraq and Afghanistan... As today, western politicians found it easier to blame 'Muslim fanaticism' for the bloodshed they had unleashed than to examine the effects of their own foreign policies."

***

All in all, then, a remarkable book. I'd be happy to go along with Sam Jordison: "While I can’t categorically state it’s the best book ever, I find it hard to think of one that I prefer. One that does more as a work of fiction, or that says more about our flawed humanity."


The Gate of Victory at Fatehpur Sikri, 2011. Inscribed there are these words: "'The World is a Bridge, pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day, may hope for eternity; but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer, for the rest is unseen." Empires, take note...