MAN BOOKER PRIZE 1973
Booker club: The Siege of Krishnapur
Looking back at the Booker: JG Farrell
Its unforgivingly exact portrait of the British in 19th century India makes it probably the best Booker winner I've read yet
In the mid-1970s, the Booker panel were suckers for punishment. The year after John Berger threw his award in their faces (or more accurately, threw it at the Black Panthers, knowing how much annoyance that would cause) the prize went to the equally subversive JG Farrell. At the ceremony he pointedly remarked that he was going to use the money they'd give him to research "commercial exploitation" and noted that: "Every year, the Booker brothers see their prize wash up a monster more horrid than the last."
Once again, it can only be assumed that the prize committee must have had some inkling of what was coming. The Siege Of Krishnapur might not be so explicitly Marxist as G, but as an exploration of the past and, by association, contemporary values, the book is just as incendiary, and just as uncompromising.
The siege of the fictional town of Krishnapur that Farrell describes was explicitly based on the real experiences of British subjects during the Indian rebellion of 1857. (More commonly know as "the Indian Mutiny", a semantic minefield that gives a measure of the kind of territory Farrell was charging into.)
The inspiration is a diary kept by Maria Germon, a young woman who had been through the siege of Lucknow. Farrell spins off from this to give an account not so much of the military tactics and feats of daring associated with warfare as day-to-day life under siege conditions. As such it's a dazzling success. The sights and smells of the siege are vividly conjured. The stench of putrefaction permeates all the later stages of the book, while horrific observations like those about carrion birds so bloated on corpses they ignore the huge piles of sheep offal festering inside the town are deliberately made to feel mundane, as is the stark fact that everyone is growing visibly thinner by the day.
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| Troubles is the first in JG Farrell's (above) trilogy on the British empire, which also includes The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip. Photograph: Jane Bown |
Equally effective is the exploration of how and why these starched Victorians start to wilt, and where their breaking point lies. Farrell mercilessly strips his characters of their defences and batters their values with something approaching glee. Here's how he describes the decline of the town's leader, the Collector: "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."
Farrell said that he wanted to show "yesterday reflected in today's consciousness", but by association, of course, he also holds a glass up to the modern world. His comically detailed descriptions of various residents' losses of faith - coupled with their outlandish religious beliefs and the way they adhere to now discredited theories like phrenology - forces us into a hard look at the accepted wisdom of the modern world (say, the immediacy of global warming, or the need to worship Radiohead). I for one felt a shudder of new uncertainty.
Then, there is colonialism. When the audiobook of The Siege Of Krishnapur came out in 2005, a writer in the Sunday Times said: "A novel set in India in 1857, the year of the Mutiny, in which the points of view of the Indians are almost nonexistent, would be unlikely to win the Man Booker prize these days." That's perhaps worthy of a debate in itself, but it's the accusation against Farrell that interests me: the idea that, as the reviewer went on, he was guilty of "cultural imbalance". I don't buy this line at all. The fact that Indians (with the rule-proving exception of a westernised maharajah's son) are so peripheral to the action speaks volumes about the attitude of the British colonialists squirming and struggling under Farrell's microscope, not to mention the way colonialism dehumanises and brutalises the oppressor and the oppressed.
It also provokes an uncomfortable recognition about the way we still think about our colonial past. It's the fact that The Siege of Krishanpur provokes such edgy, unsettling ideas that makes me think it would be unlikely to triumph in the Booker Prize in "these days" of safe and stodgy winners, rather than any misdirected political correctness.
Finally, reading over this post, I realise that its somewhat heavy overview seriously distorts the reading experience of The Siege Of Krishnapur. This is (with the exception of a very few longeurs) an admirably smooth and light read, after all.
Yes, as Farrell himself said, it's "a novel of ideas", but it's one that he also noted can be read "as an adventure story". The book is gripping, not to mention hilarious. Jokes fly as thick and fast as the musket balls aimed at the defenders of Krishnapur, but hit their target far more regularly.
After a while it gets so that Farrell only has to mention a character's name to provoke laughter (especially Fleury, as those who have read the book will recognise). One line of dialogue at the climax of the siege really did bring tears to my eyes (a rare event), so perfect is it in its understatement and absurdity... To say more would spoil it. You'll just have to read the book if you want to know what I'm banging on about. And if you do, I'm sure you won't regret it. I'm tempted to say that this is the best Booker winner I've read so far.
THE GUARDIAN
Man Booker Prize
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