The Siege of Krishnapur
by J. G. Farrell
Summary
In 1857 the British residents of the fictional Indian station of Krishnapur find themselves besieged in the Residency by sepoys of their own army. The Collector, a man of high Victorian confidence who has visited the Great Exhibition and believes profoundly in progress, has prepared for this by fortifying the compound. Over four months the compound is reduced to almost nothing.
The comedy is the point and it is very black indeed. Two doctors conduct a public argument about the causes of cholera while people die of it. The defenders run out of shot and fire the heads of marble busts from the cannon. Furniture, pianos, plate and books are consumed by the siege, and the ideas go with them: by the end the Collector has stopped believing in almost everything he arrived with.
Farrell is doing something more serious than satire. The novel is about the moment an imperial civilisation looks at what it is actually made of, and it is unsparing about the racism of its besieged Britons without ever turning them into cardboard.
It is around three hundred and fifty pages, extremely readable, one of the funniest novels ever written about a catastrophe and widely considered one of the finest British novels of recent decades. Among the most reliably enjoyable books on the entire Booker list.
No prior knowledge of 1857 is needed and Farrell explains nothing, trusting the situation to carry you. If you have been put off the early winners by their reputation for dustiness, start here: this is the one that converts people.
Historical Context & Significance
The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker Prize in 1973, and J.G. Farrell used his acceptance speech to criticise Booker McConnell's involvement in agriculture in the developing world, one year after John Berger had done the same at greater length.
It is the middle volume of what became the Empire Trilogy, between Troubles, about the Irish War of Independence, and The Singapore Grip, about the fall of Singapore. The three are independent and can be read in any order.
Farrell drowned in 1979 at the age of forty four, swept off rocks while fishing in County Cork, leaving the trilogy as his major work. He became a double Booker winner posthumously in 2010, when Troubles took the Lost Man Booker Prize, a one off award for 1970, a year that had fallen through a change in the rules. The Siege of Krishnapur was also shortlisted for the Best of the Booker in 2008.