The Empire Trilogy (109 page)
Read The Empire Trilogy Online
Authors: J. G. Farrell
But one day, in the late seventies, he and Fleury happened to come face to face in Pall Mall and, after a moment, succeeded in recognizing each other. Fleury, too, had grown stout and perhaps rather opinionated; he and Louise had a number of children whom Fleury was inclined to hector with his views, showing extreme displeasure if they disagreed with him. The two men fell into step together; the old gentleman's pace, however, was a little too slow for Fleury who kept having to master an impulse to stride on firmly, as was his custom. Conversation was more difficult than one might have expected. They exchanged some fragments of personal news. Fleury told the Collector that his brother-in-law, General Dunstaple, who had married Miss Hughes that was, still lived in India and was currently, according to their most recent mail, shooting tigers in Nepal. His own sister, Miriam, the Collector probably did not know, had subsequently married Dr McNab and they, too, had remained in India.
“Ah yes, McNab,” said the Collector thoughtfully. “He was the best of us all. The only one who knew what he was doing.” He smiled, thinking of the invisible cholera cloud, and after a moment he added: “I was fond of your sister. I don't suppose I shall see her again.”
Half anxious to be on his way, for he had an appointment with a young lady of passionate disposition, Fleury asked the Collector about his collection of sculpture and paintings. The Collector said that he had sold them long ago.
“Culture is a sham,” he said simply. “It's a cosmetic painted on life by rich people to conceal its ugliness.”
Fleury was taken aback by this remark. He himself had a large collection of artistic objects of which he was very proud.
“There, Mr Hopkins, I cannot agree with you,” he declared loudly. “No, culture gives us an idea of a higher life to which we aspire. And
ideas
, too, are a part of culture...No one can say that ideas are a sham. Our progress depends on them...Think of their power. Ideas make us what we are. Our society is based on ideas...”
“Oh, ideas...” said the Collector dismissively.
But now Fleury really
had
to go. The old fellow walked so slowly and he himself was late already. And so Fleury raised his hat, shook hands, and hurried away. He was glad to have met the Collector again, but he had the uncomfortable feeling of many things left unsaid. Well, never mind...nobody has time to settle everything.
The years go by and the Collector undoubtedly felt, as many of us feel, that one uses up so many options, so much energy, simply in trying to find out what life is all about. And as for being able to do anything about it, well...It is hard to tell what he was thinking during this last conversation with Fleury when he said: “Oh, ideas...” After all, McNab had been right, had he not? The invisible cholera cloud had moved on. Perhaps he was thinking again of those two men and two bullocks drawing water from the well every day of their lives. 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.
The reality of the Indian Mutiny constantly defies imagination. 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; certain of my characters also had their beginnings in this material. Among the writers whom I have cannibalized in this way are Maria Germon and the Rev. H. S. Polehampton of Lucknow, F. C. Scherer, and the admirable Mark Thornhill who was the Collector at Muttra at the time of the Mutiny. The verses admired by Mr Hopkins at the meeting of the Krishnapur Poetry Society are taken from an epic poem by Samuel Warren Esq celebrating the Great Exhibition, a work which had a great success in its day, though dismissed by one reviewer as “the ravings of a madman in the Crystal Palace”.
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
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), 1935â
The siege of Krishnapur / J.G. Farrell; introduction by Pankaj Mishra.
p. cm.â(New York Review Books classics)
1. IndiaâHistoryâSepoy Rebellion, 1857â1858âFiction. 2. SiegesâFiction. I. Title. II. Series.
PR6056.A75S57 2004
823'.914âdc22
2004011934
The Singapore Grip
J.G. Farrell
Introduction by Derek Mahon
New York Review Books
New York
THE SINGAPORE GRIP
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
âthough 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 detailâan 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 narrator, as to his protagonist:
The Major raised the binoculars and gazed once more at the young man on the rock jetty, wondering what he was saying to the crowd. Behind him as he spoke great towering breakers would build up; a solid wall of water as big as a house would mount over his gesticulating arms, hang there above him for an instant as if about to engulf him, then crash around him in a torrent of foam. “He looks like a wild young fellow,” the Major said as he handed the binoculars back. Before turning away he watched another wave tower over the young Irishman, hang for a moment, and at last topple to boil impotently around his feet. It was, after all, only the lack of perspective that made it seem he would be swept away.
Rereading that, I'm aware of an uncanny parallel between the “wild young fellow,” presumably a Sinn Féin organizer, who wouldn't be swept away, and his creator, who would; and I'm reminded of some remarks, in a piece Jim wrote on his early reading, about the “hallucinating clarity of image” he admired in Conrad and Richard Hughes. He talks too about Loti's
Pêcheur d'Islande
which he read at school:
I realised with surprise that I was becoming intensely interested in this story of Breton fishermen and their difficulties .... So powerful an impression did this book make on me that even today there are certain phenomena for which an expression of Loti's will alone suffice. A certain wintry light over the sea, for example, still conjures up Loti's
lumière blafarde
. I had no idea then, nor have I now, of the precise meaning of
blafard.
In my own mind it bears such perfect witness as it is, that to find its accepted meaning might prove an inconvenience.
Well, the Oxford French Dictionary gives “pale, pallid, wan, sallow, dull, leaden.” But of course Jim is perfectly right: none of them is sufficiently
blafard
, with its edge of wildness, insanity even.
There was nothing obviously wild, much less insane, about the man I knew. Eccentric, yes; outspoken too. Adopting John Berger's precedent, he continued the practice, now alas in abeyance, whereby the recipient of a Booker Prize should bite the feeding hand in no uncertain terms. Presented with his winning check for
The Siege of Krishnapur
, he made a short speech of thanks in his mild, wandering voice and took the opportunity to criticize conditions on the Booker McConnell plantations in the West Indies.
“We devote too much time to satisfying the ego, time which could be better spent in fruitful speculation or in the service of the senses; in any case, owning things one doesn't need for some primary purpose, and that includes almost everything, has gone clean out of fashion. I'm sorry to have to break this news of the death of materialism so bluntly; I'm afraid it will come as a shock to some of your readers.” Thus spake Jim when, an unlikely fashion journalist, I interviewed him for
Vogue
in 1974. Ascetic epicurean, gregarious solitary, aristocrat of the spirit, he was then entering upon the late, disinterested “Marxist” phase (though he was never really a Marxist) which would issue in his most ambitious work,
The Singapore Grip
, with its clear-eyed depiction of economic imperialism at work in Southeast Asia and the Far East.
But there's an intimation of something else too in his hip
Vogue
prophecy. When, at his mother's suggestion, my wife and I visited the Kilcrohane house in 1981, we found on his desk and bookshelves Japanese dictionaries and Buddhist texts which seemed to indicate the way his thoughts were tending during his last year, and even to reveal an important, if barely visible, aspect of his nature; for his early brush with death and subsequent singularity had developed in him a mystical strain, one which expressed itself in impatience with London and withdrawal to the silence of West Corkâthere, in an old phrase, to make his soul. When the wise man grows weary of the world, said the Buddha, he becomes empty of desire;
when he is empty of desire, he becomes free; when he is free he knows that he is free, that rebirth is at an end, that virtue is accomplished, that duty is done and that there is no more returning to this world; thus he knows.
âD
EREK
M
AHON
Dublin, 1999
