The Siege Of Krishnapur: Winner of the Booker Prize (W&N Essentials)

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May I always accept Papa’s decisions with a good heart, without seeking to oppose them with my will.’...This dutiful phrase had surprised him. It had never occurred to him that either of the girls had a will…” 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.

My evangelism is made all the more urgent by a worrying feeling that Farrell is still underrated. In a sense, this is an absurd notion. After all, the novel has always been well-reviewed, and always had numerous and illustrious champions ( Hilary Mantel among them). It won the Booker prize in 1973 – and was subsequently also nominated for the Best of Booker prize. In The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell exposes colonialism as what it really was: a Victorian folly riddled with hypocrisy and exploitation, a fact that gradually became apparent during the Great Mutiny of 1857. The various characters holed up inside the Company’s Residency in Krishnapur each represent the different faces of the British colonialism: the Collector, a conscientious bureaucrat whose mission is to bring Western science and civilization (as exemplified by the Great Exhibition of 1851) to India; the Padre, who wants to deliver the people of India from heathenish superstitions; Harry Dunstaple, a young soldier whose sole interest is his military career in the Company’s army; the Magistrate, a cynical official obsessed with the ‘science’ of phrenology; and Fleury, an aspiring Romantic poet who has recently arrived in India with his widowed sister, Miriam. The whole lot of them, including Harry’s sister Louise and a band of loyal Company servants, spend increasingly desperate months being besieged by mutinous sepoys. Farrell’s novel is richly sensory. How does he use sensory details—particularly auditory and olfactory details—to create atmosphere and build tension? Choose several passages that you felt were especially vivid and explain why.

The normal daily rations of the food in the Commissariat.” The Collector looked at Mr Simmons as if he were being obtuse. . .” 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.

The animating event of The Siege of Krishnapur is the uprising of 1857, known variously as the Indian Mutiny, the Indian Rebellion, and the First War of Independence. Whatever it is called, it was an extremely violent affair, marked by sieges, battles, and massacres. the greater part of the improvised canister was filled with fragments of marble chipped from ‘The Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice’.”. Farrell makes his British characters pay and pay and pay for the crimes of colonization, in brutally absurd scenes. Characters are spared no degradation and yet they never lose their bone-headed, obstinate British-ness, or the certainty of their superiority. Ha, ha. This sounds too absurd. Don’t be turned away. The story is well told. You cannot properly judge a book until you have tested the writing.

The other characters are portrayed as superficial, everything exists within the vacuum created by the sieging natives and yet life goes on as normal for this section of the elite and their servants. I had to study this for my A level and it was one of the few fictional books that I've had to dissect which still came out as one of my favourite books. Walter Clemons in Newsweek on 21 October 1974 said it was "a work of wit, lively historical reconstruction and imaginative intensity." [4]