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…” What you and I object to is the emptiness of the life behind all these objects, their materialism in other words. Objects are useless by themselves. How pathetic they are compared with noble feelings! What a poor and limited world they reveal beside the world of the eternal soul! Troubles received the 1971 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and The Siege of Krishnapur received the 1973 Booker Prize. In 2010 Troubles was retrospectively awarded the Lost Man Booker Prize, created to recognise works published in 1970. Troubles and its fellow shortlisted works had not been open for consideration that year due to a change in the eligibility rules.

What’s more, I think I’d say the same thing. I’d even keep the “probably” in there. I wouldn’t want to start a scrap with Hemingway, Joyce, Jean Rhys and everyone else. But while I can’t categorically state it’s the best book ever, I find it hard to think of one that I prefer. One that does more as a work of fiction, or that says more about our flawed humanity. There is a running subplot in this story that i found delightful. There are two English doctors in the cantonment, one old, “distinguished”, and quite traditional, the other younger, Scottish and willing to take on new information (even learning from the locals! Egads!) and include that information in his therapeutics. He had decided that cholera was spread by (excuse me, but this is the medical terminology) the fecal-oral route, the taking in of “rice water” (the discharge flowing from cholera patients) and that the cause of death in these unfortunates is dehydration. Which is true. He had actually studied empiric evidence, including a report of neighborhoods in London - differentiated by where their drinking water came from - and noted radically different levels of cholera infection. The old fart was aghast that the young Scot would vary treatment from the traditional (and lethal) ways of yore - you know, heating the body, leeches, the giving of cathartics (all of which are cringeworthy). But in presenting the evidence to the group -those listening couldn’t get past the source, the messenger - after all the old guy looks more believable? 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.

On the one hand, I appreciate the value in providing the reader an immersive view into the lives of the British outpost. Farrell brilliantly portrays the way Englishmen viewed natives in colonies around the world, and occasionally juxtaposed colonial beliefs that brought out the hypocrisy in the average colonizer’s mindset. An example of this is when he shows how Europeans undermine native religious beliefs by calling them less ‘rational’ and ‘civilized,’ while simultaneously prescribing to the often equally-illogical Christian faith. The siege of Krishnapur grew on me very slowly. The cast of characters just like in ‘Troubles’ - the first part of J. G. Farrell’s Empire trilogy - is composed of humorous, tedious or simply odd individuals. As the story progresses and the residency is placed under siege, we watch them all in the face of an ordeal. The red-whiskered Collector, the very not likable Magistrate, in an unfortunate position of judge of the residency’s own poetry nights, all the fine ladies, the two doctors, the idealistic Fleury and the Rajas son Harry, with his thirst for knowledge and modernity. All of them, despite individual differences, are equally, and distinctly out of place in India, in the midst of political unrest. So last night my baby grabbed this book off my nightstand where it's been moldering for a month and ran around the room with it, shrieking, until the cover was crumpled and the bookmark had fallen out and got stomped on the floor.

Without soap all her efforts to render herself odourless had proved in vain… her only comfort was that she smelled less than many of the other ladies of her own class and, of course, than all those of the classes beneath her. Walter Clemons in Newsweek on 21 October 1974 said it was "a work of wit, lively historical reconstruction and imaginative intensity." [4] This is the third book i’ve read recently in which a particular population has a collective delusion of grandeur. Why, that could never happen to us! - while the sense of impending doom grows. We are invincible! Superior! Civilized! The creepy similarity of the East Prussian Germans in Jan. 1945, the Nazis lulled by the cooperative inhabitants of the Channel Islands during their occupation, and now the English colonists in West Bengal ignoring the imminent Sepoy mutiny of 1857. Evocative of the current: “I don’t need a mask, or a vaccination, or to change anything about my life...this is just a wee flu, and dammit, I want a haircut!” assuring that the world’s humans will inevitably suffer from variants and relapses endlessly. We’re simply not too bright as a species, are we? The three novels are in general linked only thematically, although Archer, a character in Troubles, reappears in The Singapore Grip. The protagonist of Farrell's unfinished novel, The Hill Station, is Dr McNab, introduced in The Siege of Krishnapur; this novel and its accompanying notes make the series a quartet.Suspense and subtlety, humour and horror, the near-neighbourliness of heroism and insanity: it is rare to find such divergent elements being controlled in one hand and being raced, as it were, in one yoke. But Farrell manages just this here: his imaginative insight and technical virtuosity combine to produce a novel of quite outstanding quality.