“The first sign of trouble at Krishnapur came with a mysterious distribution of chapatis” — and we’re off, to a world of high collars, stiff whiskers, picnics, poetry readings and perspiring ladies dancing under punkahs that flap like wounded birds.
The Siege of Krishnapur is a historical novel set during the Indian Uprising of 1857 and informed by contemporary sources. It’s the middle book in JG Farrell’s Empire Trilogy and my favourite. It’s authentic but not overwrought, unflinching in its critique of colonial culture but never worthy, sad as hell but fiendishly funny.
I came to it late, thanks to a recommendation from the historian Charles Glass, and was immediately drawn to Farrell’s narrator, a once-involved figure who is both melancholy and matter-of-fact. “It is a terrible thing to be clung to by a sick child if you are not used to it,” he states at one point. A siege, it seems to me, is an experiment on the human condition and every aspect of it — the action and lulls, the reduction of food, the injection of fear, the upending of norms and the sheer intensity and absurdity of circumstances — seems perfectly suited to Farrell’s anthropological eye.
He builds up the pressure in the languid heat of the East India Company cantonment with small signs of disquiet — the chapatis that appear in neat piles around the Residency, a sepoy’s wrong-handed salute, bonfires on the plain. Only Mr Hopkins, “the Collector” in charge, senses danger but he is dismissed as a croaker. Farrell skewers the British in their imperium like no other writer. The Padre wonders why the Bible was not composed in English (“the obvious language”). The Dunstaples question the sanity of George Fleury, a poetic newcomer who plays the violin in a ruined pagoda (“It certainly seemed disturbing that he had not gone hunting with Harry.”). The attitude towards the “fallen woman” whose virtue has been taken by a British soldier is devastating (“She’s done this before, you know. I mean, tried to kill herself.”). Farrell sticks his pig every time.
As the Indian soldiers encircle the cantonment, the defenders stave off heat, hunger, cholera, grinning pariah dogs and infestations of “cockchafer” bugs. Farrell engages every sense. You smell the foaming offal near the croquet lawn. You feel the salt crystals in Miriam’s armpit hair. You picture the corpse of poor Peterson, picked to the bones by scavengers with only his hands remaining, like gloves.
Advertisement
The “fallen woman”, we learn, is Miss Hughes, and then she is Lucy who makes tea and bullets for the garrison. The siege restores her power and humanity, even as it reduces the grand panjandrums of the Residency to brutes and madmen. Illusions of civility dissolve as swiftly as the mud walls in the monsoon. “Culture is a sham,” decides the Collector. “It’s a cosmetic painted on life by rich people to conceal its ugliness.” He requisitions hatstands to shore up the ramparts and uses statue-heads as cannonballs. Shakespeare’s pate is a ballistic dream, but Voltaire jams the six-pounder.
I’m inordinately fond of this book and have noticed that others beam at the mention of it, as if it were an old friend. It won the Booker prize in 1973, yet feels neglected. Farrell was only 38 when he wrote it, and 44 when he was drowned while fishing in Ireland. With luck the book’s coming half-century will bring in new readers.
My paperback is a tatty, dog-eared thing, full of marks where passages resonate anew. There’s a pandemic piquancy to rereading it now, with its factions of “the nervous” and “the confident”, and the clash between Dr Dunstaple, the long-serving civil surgeon, and Dr McNab, the “newfangled” military doctor who argues that cholera comes from the water. Dunstaple (who we just know will be a shit from an early scene where he knocks over a vase and blames Fleury) becomes rabid in his denial of McNab’s theory. To prove his point, he downs a vial of a cholera victim’s “rice-water”. Even after his death from this draught, “the notion that Dr Dunstaple had been right somehow persisted, independent of thought or reason, as insubstantial as the supposed ‘invisible cholera cloud’ itself which Dr Dunstaple believed had once hung over Newcastle”.
Jessie Childs’s next book, The Siege of Loyalty House: A Civil War Story will be published by Bodley Head in May
