J. G. Farrell | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | James Gordon Farrell (1935-01-25)25 January 1935 Liverpool, England |
| Died | 11 August 1979(1979-08-11) (aged 44) Bantry Bay, County Cork, Ireland |
| Resting place | St James' Church, Durrus |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Education | Brasenose College, Oxford |
| Notable works |
|
| Notable awards |
|
James Gordon Farrell (25 January 1935 – 11 August 1979) was an English-born novelist of Irish descent. He gained prominence for a series of novels known as "the Empire Trilogy" (Troubles,The Siege of Krishnapur andThe Singapore Grip), which deal with the political and human consequences of British colonial rule.
Troubles received the 1971Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, andThe Siege of Krishnapur received the 1973Booker Prize. In 2010,Troubles was retrospectively awarded theLost 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.[1]
Farrell, born inLiverpool, England, into a family of an Irish background, was the second of three brothers. His father, William Farrell, had worked as an accountant inBengal and, in 1929, he married Prudence Josephine Russell, a former receptionist and secretary to a doctor. From the age of 12, he attendedRossall School inLancashire. After World War II, the Farrells moved toDublin, following which Farrell spent much time in Ireland. This, perhaps combined with the popularity ofTroubles, leads many to regard him as an Irish writer. After leaving Rossall, he taught in Dublin and also worked for some time onDistant Early Warning Line in the Canadian Arctic. In 1956, he went to study atBrasenose College, Oxford; while there he contractedpolio. This left him partially disabled and disease was prominent in his works. In 1960, he left Oxford withthird-class honours in French and Spanish and went to live in France, where he taught at alycée.[2]
Farrell published his first novel,A Man From Elsewhere, in 1963. Set in France, it shows the clear influence of FrenchExistentialism. The story follows Sayer, a journalist for a communist paper, as he tries to find skeletons in Regan's closet. Regan is a dying novelist who is about to be awarded an important Catholic literary prize. The book mimics the fight between the two leaders of French existentialism:Jean-Paul Sartre andAlbert Camus, Sayer representing Sartre and Regan Camus. The two argue about existentialism: the position that murder can be vindicated as an expedient in overthrowing tyranny (Sartre) versus the stance that there are no ends that justify unjust means (Camus).Bernard Bergonzi reviewed it in theNew Statesman's 20 September 1963 issue, writing: "Many first novels are excessively autobiographical, butA Man from Elsewhere suffers from the opposite fault of being a cerebral construct, dreamed up out of literature and the contemporary French cinema."Simon Raven wrote inThe Observer on 15 September 1963: "Mr. Farrell's style is spare, his plotting lucid and well timed; his expositions of moral or political problems are pungent if occasionally didactic."[2] It entirely lacks the ironic humour and tender appreciation of human frailty that characterise his later work. Farrell came to dislike the book.[citation needed]
Two years after this cameThe Lung, in which Farrell returned to his real-life trauma of less than a decade earlier: the main character Martin Sands contracts polio and has to spend a long period in hospital. It has been noted that it is somewhat modelled after Farrell, but it is modelled more after Geoffrey Firmin fromMalcolm Lowry's 1947 novel,Under the Volcano.[2] The anonymous reviewer forThe Observer on 31 October 1965 wrote that "Mr. Farrell gives the pleasantly solid impression of really having something to write about", and one forThe Times Literary Supplement on 11 November 1965 that "Mr. Farrell's is an effective, potent brew, compounded of desperation and a certain wild hilarity."[2]
In 1967, Farrell publishedA Girl in the Head. The protagonist, the impoverished Polish count Boris Slattery, lives in the fictional English seaside town of Maidenhair Bay, in the house of the Dongeon family (believed to be modelled afterV. S. Naipaul'sA House for Mr Biswas). His marriage to Flower Dongeon is decaying. His companion is Dr. Cohen, who is a dying alcoholic. Boris also has sex with an underage teenager, June Furlough, and fantasises about Ines, a Swedish summer guest, the titular "girl in the head". Boris is believed to be modelled on Humbert Humbert inVladimir Nabokov'sLolita.[2] Like its two predecessors, the book met only middling critical and public reaction. In the 13 July 1967 issue ofThe Listener,Ian Hamilton wrote that he disliked the novel, and thought it was, at best, an "adroit pastiche" ofSamuel Beckett's deadbeats.[2] Martin Levin inThe New York Times Book Review on 23 March 1969 praised Farrell's "flair for giving the ridiculous an inspired originality".[2] An anonymous reviewer inThe New York Times Book Review on 20 July 1967 wrote: "verbal assurance and resourcefulness show that Mr. Farrell is not content to coast along merely imitating his previous work. Such a deliberate extension of range is perhaps a hopeful sign for a talent which, after three novels, still has not found the mode in which to fulfil its attractive promise."[2]
Troubles tells the comic yet melancholy tale of an Englishman, Major Brendan Archer, who in 1919 goes toCounty Wexford in Ireland to reunite with his fiancée, Angela Spencer. From the crumbling Majestic Hotel at Kilnalough, he watches Ireland's fight for independence from Britain. Farrell started writing the book while on aHarkness Fellowship in the United States and finished it in a flat inKnightsbridge, London. He got the idea for the setting from going toBlock Island and seeing the remains of an old burned-down hotel.[3] He won aGeoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for the novel, and with the prize money travelled to India to research his next novel.[2]
Farrell's next book,The Siege of Krishnapur, and his last completed work,The Singapore Grip, both continue his story of the collapse of British colonial power. The former deals with theIndian Rebellion of 1857. Inspired by historical events such as the sieges ofCawnpore andLucknow, the novel is set in the fictional town of Krishnapur, where a besieged British garrison succeeds in holding out for four months against an army of nativesepoys in the face of enormous suffering before being relieved.
The third of the novels,The Singapore Grip, centres upon the Japanese capture of the British colonial city ofSingapore in 1942, while also exploring at some length the economics and ethics of colonialism at the time, as well as the economic relationships between developed andThird World countries.
The three novels are in general linked only thematically, although Archer, a character inTroubles, reappears inThe Singapore Grip. The protagonist of Farrell's unfinished novel,The Hill Station, is Dr McNab, introduced inThe Siege of Krishnapur; this novel and its accompanying notes make the series a quartet.
WhenThe Siege of Krishnapur won theBooker Prize in 1973, Farrell used his acceptance speech to attack the sponsors, theBooker Group, for their business involvement in the agricultural sector in the Third World.[4]
Charles Sturridge scripted a film version ofTroubles made for British television in 1988 and directed byChristopher Morahan.[5]
In 1979, Farrell decided to quit London to live on theSheep's Head peninsula inCounty Cork, Ireland. A few months later he drowned on the coast ofBantry Bay after falling into the sea from rocks while angling.[6] He was 44.[7]
"Had he not sadly died so young",Salman Rushdie said in 2008, "there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary."[8]
Farrell is buried in the churchyard of theSt James' Church, aChurch of Ireland parish church inDurrus. The manuscript library atTrinity College, Dublin, holds his papers:Papers of James Gordon Farrell (1935–1979). TCD MSS 9128-60.
Peter Morey wrote that "an interpretation of the novels of J. G. Farrell andPaul Scott as examples ofpost-colonial fiction [is possible], since both partake of oppositional and interrogative narrative practices which recognize and work to dismantle the staple elements of imperial narrative."[2]
Derek Mahon dedicates his poem "A Disused Shed in County Wexford" to Farrell, possibly in reference to the topic ofTroubles.
Ronald Binns described Farrell's colonial novels as "probably the most ambitious literary project conceived and executed by any British novelist in the 1970s."[2][9]
In the 1984 novelForeign Affairs byAlison Lurie, Vinnie Miner, the protagonist, reads a Farrell novel on her flight from New York to London. In the 1991 novelThe Gates of Ivory byMargaret Drabble, the writer Stephen Cox is modelled on Farrell.[2]
Farrell said to George Brock in an interview forThe Observer, "the really interesting thing that's happened during my lifetime has been the decline of theBritish Empire."[2][10]
Kalpaklı, Fatma. "British Novelists and Indian Nationalism: Contrasting Approaches in the Works of Mary Margaret Kaye, James Gordon Farrell and Zadie Smith", Bethesda: Academica Press, 2010.ISBN 978-193-314-677-5.
