February 2012 Guest Editor Joanna Trollope on J.G. Farrell...
He won the Lost Booker prize for Troubles and the real Booker – forever ago - for The Siege Of Krishnapur. I love the elegance of his writing, and the wit, and the sense of the absurd, and the way he can transport you to a whole crazy other world. He drowned, off the coast of Ireland, when he was only 44. A real loss.
The Lovereading view...
A new edition of the 1973 Booker Prize winning novel. A brilliant, dark humorous book about the decline of colonialism and an exploration of class, race and culture in general. Great stuff.
In the Spring of 1857, with India on the brink of a violent and bloody mutiny, Krishnapur is a remote town on the vast North Indian plain. For the British there, life is orderly and genteel. Then the sepoys at the nearest military cantonment rise in revolt and the British community retreats with shock into the Residency. They prepare to fight for their lives with what weapons they can muster. As food and ammunition grow short, the Residency, its defences battered by shot and shell and eroded by the rains, becomes ever more vulnerable.
The Siege of Krishnapur is a modern classic of narrative excitement that also digs deep to explore some fundamental questions of civilisation and life.
J.G. Farrell was born in Liverpool in 1935 and spent a
good deal of his life abroad, including periods in France and North
America, and then settled in London where he wrote most of his novels.
In April 1979 he went to live in County Cork where only four months
later he was drowned in a fishing accident.
