Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming—what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett's price-fixing and market manipulation—but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end. A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip completes the “Empire Trilogy” that began withTroubles and the Booker prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur.
Winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize, this darkly hilarious book about the Irish war for independence takes place in a crumbling hotel on Ireland's west coast, a place where madness and brutality have begun to reign. 1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancée is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin. As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of "the troubles." Troubles is a hilarious and heartbreaking work by a modern master of the historical novel.
Winner of the Booker Prize. An insightful and thrilling novel about the British Empire in India during the Great Mutiny of 1857, as seen through the eyes of a young, love-struck idealist. India, 1857—the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years. Farrell's story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumors of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion—at once brutal, blundering, and wistful—is soon revealed. The Siege of Krishnapur is a companion to Troubles, about the Easter 1916 rebellion in Ireland, and The Singapore Grip, which takes place just before World War II, as the sun begins to set upon the British Empire. Together these three novels offer an unequaled picture of the follies of empire.
The Empire Trilogy--consisting of the Lost Booker Prize-winning Troubles, the Booker Prize-winning The Siege of Krishnapur,and The Singapore Grip--is Farrell's re-examination of the legacy, and limits, of British imperial rule. The three volumes, connected by theme rather than character, and above all by their shared wit, brio, and daring, range in setting from the India of the Great Mutiny of 1857, to Ireland immediately after the Great War, to the besieged Singapore of World War II. Together the books constitute not only a spectacular entertainment but also an ambitious refashioning of the traditional historical novel to meet the tragic realities of the modern world. · The Siege of Krishnapur - India, 1857--the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.Farrell's story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumors of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion--at once brutal, blundering, and wistful--is soon revealed. · Troubles - 1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancée is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin. As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of "the troubles." · The Singapore Grip - Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming--what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett's price-fixing and market manipulation--but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end.
J.G. Farrell's Empire Trilogy (1970-78) was one of the major achievements of post-war fiction and inspired new generation of writers keen to explore the legacy of the Empire and the emerging postcolonial spaces created in its wake. This new, invigorating and accessible study excitingly explores the substance and significance of the Empire Trilogy and assesses its damning and influential critique of British colonial rule. Rather than positioning him at the end of a tradition of nostalgic Empire writing, John McLeod shows how Farrell's novels attempt to satirise the perspectives of those who served the Empire and were caught up in its decline. McLeod also explores Farrell's intriguing early fiction, as well as his unfinished posthumously-published novel, and accounts for his changing critical legacy since his premature death in 1980, aged 44. This insightful study will stimulate both new and established readers of a much beloved and missed novelist.
In this full-length biography, Greacen disentangles not only the circumstances of the novelist's death by drowning, but also the story of his life and how it informed everything he wrote.
When it was originally published in 1986, this book was the first full-length study of Farrell’s fiction. Ronald Binns provides a comprehensive account of the development of this idiosyncratic Anglo-Irish novelist’s career. Farrell’s Empire trilogy was one of the most ambitious literary projects of the 20th Century and Binns examines in detail its component parts – Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip – showing their structural links and discussing Farrell’s use both of historical materials and of parody, pastiche and symbol in his ironic vision of the end of the empire.
The Siege of Krishnapur, the second of Farrell's Empire Trilogy, won the Booker Prize in 1973, and it was selected as one of only six previous winners to compete in the 2008 international Best of Booker competition. The strength of American interest in Farrell's books is underlined by the inclusion of all three Trilogy novels in the Classics imprint of the New York Review of Books. Troubles won the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. Many of these selected letters are written to women whom Jim Farrell loved and whom he inadvertently hurt. His ambition to be a great writer in an age of minimal author's earnings ruled out the expense of marriage and fatherhood, so self-sufficiency was his answer. Books Ireland has astutely portrayed him as "a mystery wrapped in an enigma, a man who wanted solitude and yet did not want it, wanted love but feared commitment, reached out again and again but, possibly through fear of rejection, was always the first to cut the cord." But Farrell's kindness, deft humor and gift for friendship reached across rejection, which must account for why so many such letters were kept. Funny, teasing, anxious and ambitious, these previously unpublished letters to a wide range of friends give the reader a glimpse of this private man. Ranging from childhood to the day before his death, Farrell's distinctive letters have the impact of autobiography.
A classic novel by a Booker Prize-winning author To the cool of the Simla hills comes a reluctant Dr McNab, with his wife and young niece. For Emily, romance is in the air. For the mysterious Mrs Forester, there is scandal brewing. And for the Bishop of Simla, rainclouds are not the only storms on the horizon. The Hill Station is the novel on which J.G. Farrell was working at the time of his tragically early accidental death. It demonstrates powerfully what a great loss to world literature this was.
