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129 of 133 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My greatest 'find' of the decade, February 20, 2003
I had never heard of J.G. Farrell or The Siege of Krishnapur until one day I was scanning a list of winner of England's Booker Prize and I noticed that Siege was out-of-print in America. I was so intrigued I sent off to England for it, but it is now also available in the U.S. The novel narrates the story of the British community at Krishnapur during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, when the entire community holed up in the Residency (like a governor's palace) for months under siege. Farrell's style is highly cinematic, reminiscent of great movie epics about that era, such as "The Man Who Would Be King," - lots of scope, majesty, explosions, and bright-red uniforms, added to the day-to-day domestic squabbles of the community. Farrell's take is not a shallow war novel though; he is witty, ironic, inspired, and sad in turn. The book features remarkable turns of fortune and engaging details on every page, all of which were dramatically motivated and apt. (Examples: When the besieged run out of ammunition, they create canister shot by stuffing ladies' stockings with silverware. There's a sudden infestation of flying bugs that will make you jump right out of your chair. Two doctors have an argument about the cause of cholera with dramatic consequences. A lucky shot by a Lieutenant....well I won't spoil it for you.) The main character, the Collector, seems to stand in for all of Britain as he is transformed by his Indian experience: first arrogance and a passion for bringing British `civilization' to the uncivilized, then bravado as he stands up to the initial assaults, then despair as he watches the failure of mere ingenuity to overcome the natives. In a wonderful little coda at the end of the book you can see how he has been utterly transformed by the experience. A wonderful find, a 'must read'! I'm off to read the rest of Farrell's novels!
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48 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"What a lot of Indian life was unavailable to Englishmen.", February 20, 2003
The bloody Siege of Krishnapur in 1857 is the pivot around which the action revolves in this Booker Award-winning novel by J. G. Farrell, but Farrell's focus is less on Krishnapur and the siege than it is on the attitudes and beliefs of the English colonizers who made that siege an inevitability. He puts these empire-builders under the microscope, then skewers their arrogant and superior attitudes with the rapier of his wit, subjecting them to satire and juxtaposing them and their narrowly focused lives against the realities of the world around them. Remarkably, he does this with enough subtlety that we can recognize his characters as individuals, rather than total stereotypes, at the same time that we see their absurdity and recognize the damage they have done in their zeal to spread their "superior" culture. From the opening pages, Farrell builds suspense as the English colony ignores reports of unrest in Barrackpur, Berhampur, and Meerut. The flirtations of the single women, the amorous attentions of the young men, the boorish and insensitive behavior of the officials, the gossipy whispering of their wives, and the unrelenting efforts to maintain the same society they enjoyed at home--with tea parties, poetry readings, and dances--all attest to their degree of isolation from the world around them. When violence breaks out in Krishnapur and all the inhabitants take refuge in the colonial Residence, Farrell turns it into a microcosm which illuminates their misplaced values and goals as they interact with each other and face dangers from without--and from within. The siege continues for more than three months, with bloodshed, disease, starvation, lack of water and medicine, and the summer weather taking their toll. Farrell's dark humor is unparalleled. Using irony, understatement, and a sense of the absurd, he conveys his disapproval of colonialism without resorting to the harshness of polemics. By concentrating exclusively on the English in the Residence and not on India's local population (ironically reflecting the approach of the colonizers themselves), he makes their behavior appear ridiculous in its own right, rather than ridiculous in comparison to other cultures. Mr. Rayne, the Opium Agent, calls the sale of opium, "progress." The Padre cannot understand why the Bible was originally written in an obscure language like Hebrew, rather than English, which is "spoken in every corner of every continent." A dying man offering up his last, heartfelt prayer is told by the Magistrate, "Yes, yes, to be sure, don't worry about it." The heads from a collection of small sculptures of the "great minds of Europe" are used as deadly explosives when shot becomes scarce. Through his precise imagery, his acute eye for memorable and revealing details, his unerring ear for dialogue, his ability to maintain pace and suspense, and his humor, Farrell creates a historical novel with the enduring qualities which make it as relevant today as it was when published thirty years ago. Mary Whipple
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34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
DEATH, WHERE IS THY POINT?, May 9, 2006
Chapatis. It is always difficult to start a novel convincingly, but it's a long time since I saw it done better than it is here. The harbinger of the brutal and bloody Indian uprising of 1857 was, in this narrative at least, the secret distribution of chapatis to the intended victims. I have long forgotten what little I may ever have known about these events, and I would actually be delighted to discover that this detail was not an invention of the novelist's but what actually happened. If paraphrased, the amount of gore and squalor that is detailed here on page after page would seem grotesque and even intolerable. As told by Farrell, it manages to be neither. This was the Victorian era, and the story is a scenario of British Victorians subjected to pressure and strain of near-incredible ferocity. The author does not spare us the specifics, and it will be a long time before I forget the spongy piles of corpses, the sense of near-unbearable heat in which I for one would have had difficulty in even wearing the stuffy formal clothes let alone dancing let alone battling for my very life, the pervasive stench, the outbreak of cholera and the indelible vignette of the lapdog chewing the face off a fallen defender. Even more extraordinary, to me, than the way they keep going is what they don't do and in particular what they think and don't think. There is no real instance of irrational panic whatsoever, and although the Padre for one has clearly gone slightly round the bend, the way this manifests itself is in an obsessional fixation with denouncing Sin and Heresy, and largely with his frantic concern to prove that great Victorian preoccupation The Existence of God from something like Aquinas's Argument from Design. At the height of the horror, the Collector is still thinking in Victorian vocabulary and expressing himself in subordinate clauses. Staring death in the eye, the young intellectual Fleury is still concerned with his theories, whether in respect of the operation of guns or of the progress of rationalism. The ladies themselves, who might have been expected to be in a state of blind terror, are still weighing up the niceties of how the matrons and widows on the one hand, and the Fallen Woman on the other, are expected to comport themselves. Most amazingly of all, when the cholera first breaks out the two doctors conduct a lengthy and articulate debate on its causes and remedies, keeping the attention not just of each other but of an attentive audience. The book abounds in unforgettable incidents - the smothering cloud of cockchafer beetles, the snowstorm, the slaughter of one rebel contingent with silver forks from the dining-room and marble busts of Socrates and Keats - but what is distinctive and extraordinary about this book is its tone. Its tone is quiet, detached and wry without being aggressively ironic. No heavy lessons are preached (although it's not hard to see which side the author is on when it comes to religion). No particular political standpoint is adopted either, the nearest we get to that being the shoulder-shrugging last paragraph. The whole saga ought to have been a filthy nightmare, but instead the reader feels rather like the onlookers who have come along with picnic lunches to watch the events as if they were watching a game of cricket. It has all been Virgil's `plurima mortis imago' - the omnipresent face of death, and yet it has been a bit of a spectator-sport too. I'm actually rather glad I'm no historian in this instance. I don't know what set off the uprising, and once the relief forces turn up so far as I know things went back to much as they were before. The author offers us no theories or explanations: he just leaves us having witnessed wholesale and insensate slaughter and wondering what it can all have been in aid of.
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