The pitfalls of knowing better

Thoughts on J G Farrell and the how and why of fallible perspective

Reminiscing about the editing habits of Craig Raine on here last week, I mentioned an essay I wrote for the Booker Prize issue of Areté, concerned with J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, which won in 1973. A few people asked me about it. I did and do wonder about the virtue of explaining why an old book isn’t great, or why you happen not to like it very much, but in this case, I thought perhaps there is interest in the exercise given that what I consider the failures were perceived at the time, and since, as strengths and this is curious.

Given that I don’t talk specifically about reception, the essay is arguably vitiated by hypocrisy. I complain that Farrell shows that many Victorian beliefs were obviously daft without explaining why people held them — other than, implicitly, as a self-interest that made blindness attractive or necessary, but this hardly qualifies as a total explanation. You were left primarily with the conclusion that they were a bit silly, hypocritical, a position that commits what E P Thompson, in a particular connection but anyway, called the enormous condescension of posterity (i.e. we know better) and avoids the sort of analytic terrain explored by philosophers or historians of thought, such as Richard Rorty in the passages about the opponents of heliocentrism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Likewise, I am open to the charge of showing, or trying to show, that Farrell’s devices are clumsy but without addressing the question — secondary in a literary essay? more on this below — of why he won the Booker Prize and why virtually no-one has seemed to the find the novel deficient.

Criticism can take an approach of ‘I’m right, they’re wrong,’ but literary and cultural history poses greater challenges and has bigger responsibilities. Revaluation of the sort developed between the wars by T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis, to shake up the canon, dislodging the Romantics, and so on, didn’t seem especially fussed about why centuries of intelligent readers had been, say, wrong about Milton, but in the period afterwards, those questions were asked in books like Rosemond Tuve’s Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-century Critics (1947) and Joseph E. Duncan’s The Revival of Metaphysical Poetry: The History of a Style, 1800 to the Present (1959). I will look again at Christopher Ricks’s book Milton’s Grand Style, which argues that Eliot and Leavis were wrong about Milton and the nature of his poetic effects – they were delicate and precise, he didn’t merely possess the power of a steamroller and so on. I’m not sure whether he wonders how they got it wrong – he reveres them both as readers – or is merely concerned, rather in their own spirit, of showing this to be the case.

Why stuff does and doesn’t last, why we dislike things others admire — the varieties and vagaries of taste as a mental and historical phenomenon — is a large topic, more easily explored in the case of writers with rollercoaster reputations or a lot of critical debate around them. I have attempted exercises of this kind with a range of figures, to the extent that one of my editors ridicules it as a reflex. So I probably would have done it with Farrell if there had been an obvious way. I do a bit of afterlife-y throat-clearing at start. But in any case, this was commissioned by a journal with origins in Leavis and (especially) Eliot and also Grub Street, a place which Leavis hated but with which he nonetheless shared a priority, the rendering of value judgments.

On ‘The Siege of Krishnapur’

JG Farrell travelled to Bombay in early 1971, armed with a couple of addresses, a guide book for travellers on a budget, and a plan to “get material for a novel set in Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny”. His previous book Troubles hadn’t done very much. He was making do with “faint hopes” – later fulfilled – of a French sale. The Booker Prize had started a couple of years earlier. Its first winner, P H Newby’s Something to Answer For, made it onto the bestseller list. But the administrators changed the cut-off date between the first and seconds years. Troubles fell into a wormhole from which it did not emerge until 2010, when it was awarded the Lost Man Booker Prize.

Farrell’s former agent, responding to this improbable development, said that Farrell, who died in 1979, would have been “thrilled”. A little relieved too perhaps. By 2010, Farrell’s reputation was hardly more secure than it had been when he set off for India. The Indian rebellion novel he ended up writing, The Siege of Krishnapur, had seen off any potential wormholes and loopholes. It was awarded the Booker in 1973. But all those years later, what that meant was that the volumes of his Empire trilogy – volume three being The Singapore Grip – carried the description “Winner of the Booker Prize”. That was by then true of a number of books we no longer often read.

Renewed recognition helped to distinguish Farrell from the pack. Two years earlier, The Siege of Krishnapur made the shortlist for the Best of the Booker, which was awarded instead to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, another book written after a consciously undertaken trip to India (again, done “as cheaply as possible”). Almost winning a confected prize in 2008 and winning another one in 2010 proved more beneficial than having won a major one in 1973 or the concerted critical advocacy he had received in the intervening period from admirers including Rushdie, Timothy Mo, and Hilary Mantel. Farrell hadn’t received a single mention in the London Review of Books between 1995 and the Troubles win, and though he did slightly better in the TLS, he was mentioned less frequently than James T Farrell and not all that much more than Colin Farrell. The references that didn’t cite him as a Booker winner mentioned in one connection with one or another marginal group: Anglo-Irish novelists, English post-colonial writers, forerunners of William Boyd. . . James T Farrell seemed to have a stronger claim on posterity simply by virtue of being associated with two famous Johns, Steinbeck and Dos Passos, and with a movement, American naturalism. If J G Farrell is part of any gang, it’s the wrong sort. He corresponded with Piers Paul Read and Francis King. He’s depicted in a Margaret Drabble novel. Although you certainly couldn’t accuse Farrell of parochialism, he is part of the old order that the arrival of Martin Amis and co prompted onlookers to cast, however unjustly, as somehow narrowly English.

A writer’s work is often less important than the idea of their work – its connotations and key-words. In this case, though, I am not sure the work always helps enough. Farrell himself entertained strong doubts about The Siege of Krishnapur. After writing “about 100 pages”, he found he was to struggling “to incorporate some of the ideas of the 1850s” which he wanted to feature but persevered out of a fear that “that the book will be monumentally dull without them”. Elsewhere he writes that “too much research” has left “me and the book in a near-hopeless muddle”. And once he was done, he confessed to “private misgivings about its superficiality.” Even if those assessments contain a degree of wilful modesty, the descriptions are clear-sighted. For much of its length, The Siege of Krishnapur is a novel that doesn’t know what to do with its immense knowledge of the East India Company, the siege of Lucknow, British and Anglo-Indian social and intellectual life, its ideas — many of them ideas about ‘ideas’ — and the wealth of detail about customs and garrisons and so on. Or rather Farrell thinks he knows what to do them: spray them with authorial irony. But that doesn’t prove a wholly effective approach.

The novel proves most engaging in the opening pages. Hopkins, the district magnate of Krishnapur, or ‘Collector’, starts finding chapatis – flatbread – wherever he goes, and becomes convinced that they augur a rebellion by the sepoys, the Indian soldiers employed in the local garrison. The warnings he offers are treated as ridiculous. Once a dignified figure, he quickly finds himself “a great source of amusement”. But the reader, recognising the history or just noting the book’s title, knows that he will be vindicated. A siege soon begins.

The pantomime element is initially refreshing but Farrell wears it thin. From the Cassandra conceit onwards, everything in the novel derives its meaning and intended effect from an irony either internal to the story or enabled by historical perspective or the reader’s common sense. The novel subsists almost entirely on games to do with knowledge. One way or another, Farrell is constantly nudging to see what his characters are missing.

Hopkins isn’t right about everything. After the cantonment is besieged, he finds himself responsible for dealing with corpses, and we are treated to one of Farrell’s local – faster-working – ironic observations. “At first he thought: ‘This is easy. The working classes make a lot of fuss about nothing.’ But... soon his hands became blistered and painful.” On the next page, Hopkins tries to convince himself that life goes on: “he thought how normal everything still was here. It might have been any evening of the years he had spent in Krishnapur.” Then comes the punchline, or punchlines: “Only his ragged coat, his boots soiled from digging graves, his poorly trimmed whiskers, and his exhausted appearance would have given one to suspect that there was anything amiss.” Then: “That and the sound of gunfire from the compound.”

Attempts at evasion brutally undermined — wishful thinking derailed or exposed by realities — occur again and again. When Hopkins suggests that the survivors of the siege should blow themselves up to avoid a worse fate at the hands of the enemy, Volkins, his servant, resists it immediately: “His enthusiasm was in no way aroused by the prospect... the more he thought about it, the less appetite he found he had for it. Still... perhaps it was better than falling into the hands of those negroes out there!” At another point, a character tells himself: “if she were dead, what had happened to her before dying did not bear thinking about (though he did think about it, all the same).” The central bind becomes less ingenious every time it manifests itself.

The ideas of the 1850s that Farrell was worried about incorporating centre on subjects such as “the advance of science”, “theories about civilisation”, “the latest discoveries in medicine”. At one point, during an argument with the delicate progressive intellectual Fleury about the existence of God, the Padre asks: “Can you deny the indications of contrivance and design to be found in the works of nature ... contrivance and design which far surpasses anything we human beings are capable of?” As Fleury loads a six-pounder and comes upon two sowars cleaving the skull of “the last of the Eurasian defenders”, he proceeds to list the eel’s eye and the fish's, the bent teeth of the Indian hog, the milk of viviparous female, the middle claw of the heron and cormorant, and the proboscis of the bee. “In everything on earth we see evidence of design”, he proclaims. We get Farrell’s point about the Padre’s conduct as thoroughly as Fleury gets the Padre’s message, though Fleury catches his breath long enough to provide the scene’s clinching irony: “Could it not be, he wondered vaguely... that somehow or other fish designed their own eyes? But no, that, of course, quite impossible.” (When the book pits comic logic and theology in this way, it’s hard to avoid noting that The Siege of Krishnapur isn’t even the best Booker Prize winning post-colonial novel that alludes to the conflict between naturalism and faith, Anglican in-fighting, and a floating church: Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda won in 1988.)

There’s a lengthy debate about how to treat cholera, justly deemed “monotonous” and “tiresome” by those present. One doctor, Dunstaple, shows himself to be credulous and hide-bound, while another, McNab, cites the example of Dr Snow and the water pump. In retrospect, it is inevitable that Dunstaple proceeds to contract cholera, receives the correct modern treatment from McNab, but then, once McNab “had thoughtfully retired as his patient was regaining consciousness, for fear of irritating him”, insists the treatment be undone, crying "Bring back the mustard-plasters instantly! Bring brandy and the mendicants I ordered. Hot compresses and be quick about it or else I'm doomed!” There’s a sting in the tale offered a few pages later, derived from irony both context (the reader's knowledge of fact) and internal (the patent ridiculousness of what's occurring). We are told it was not agreed throughout the camp that Dunstaple had lost his argument with McNab simply because he died: "who was to say that the Dunstaple treatment was not just beginning to work...” Farrell’s desired response seems to be a scoff when it isn’t the belly laugh, and if there’s intent beneath these broad comic situations, it doesn’t go very deep.

The cholera debate at least pertains to a matter of seriousness or urgency. Discussions of a more academic and abstract kind continue long after the sepoys have declared their intentions. “The Padre explained all this and more to the little garrison. They were glad of prayers... But they became a little impatient as the Padre rambled on about Sin. What he said was true, no doubt, but they had the enemy to think of... It was rather like having someone keep asking you the time when your house is on fire. They found it hard to give him their whole attention.” To repeat this strategy implies a presumption on Farrell’s part that the joke is a very funny one, which immediately turns the reader against it.

This is also an example of a related habit – Farrell’s tendency to badger the elegance and crispness out of every conceit. He could have stopped with “the enemy to think of...” but instead pushes onto the house-on-fire simile. It occurs earlier in the book, when the narrator writes that Hopkins found virtues in pretty women “which he would not have noticed had they been ugly” before delivering the sly comic sentence that should have been supplied on its own, without the preceding explanation: “Soon he began to find Miriam sensible and mature, which was only to say that he liked her grey eyes and her smile”. Later, when the bidders at an auction spend wildly–a jar of ‘mendy’ goes for five guineas–we infer that it’s partly delirium, partly a lack of belief in consequences. But after giving the scene more than a page, Farrell explains: “Hardly any of the men making these rash bids expected to live to pay for them. In their present mood people would think nothing of mortgaging themselves for years ahead in order to acquire some trifling luxury like a jar of brandied peaches or a few leaves of tobacco.” It’s a very strange set of impulses, to write a comic set-piece, then explain it, then offer a theoretical paraphrase (“like a jar of brandied peaches”) of something that has been depicted in actual form.

There is no denying the book’s seriousness as an exploration and serial paraphrase of elements of mid-Victorian thought. But even in this area, Farrell is less interested in portraying the potential validity of competing perspectives — or in exploring how or why they came to be held — than in simply revealing the various degrees of myopia. The Padre emerges as the worst sufferer, and is the subject late in the book of one of Farrell’s Forster-like cogitations: “As silk-worms secret silk, so human beings secrete sin. There is a normal quantity of sin which, for their everlasting punishment, any community of erring humans cannot help spinning in the course of their lives. But what puzzled the Padre was the nature of the particular divine grievance for which they were now suffering such an extreme punishment. What could it be?”

Clearly Farrell doesn’t view this as a divine grievance. But it’s not altogether clear which earthly grievances, what normal human errors, are being punished by the uprising. At first, organised religion is at fault — Anglicanism has been forced on a Muslim and Hindu population. Hopkins seems to believe in a spiritual existence advanced, facilitated, and supported by the Victorians’ ingenious practical discoveries. But when elements of this view are presented for our consideration, Farrell doesn’t allow himself to grant them sufficient seriousness. Hopkins is shown wondering why, six years after the Great Exhibition (which he had attended “in an official capacity”), the train carriage that supplied its own railway was not “crawling about everywhere”. Soon enough – though only after Farrell himself has nudged the reader on the issue – Hopkins begins to doubt the morality inherent in the concept of progress. The symbolism is evident among the silliness when the Exhibition artefacts which Hopkins owns are repurposed as weaponry: “the greater part of the improvised canister was filled with fragments of marble chipped from The Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice…Without a doubt the most effective missiles... had been the heads of his electro-metal figures... And of the heads, perhaps not surprisingly, the most effective of all had been Shakespeare's”.

By the end, Hopkins, if he doesn’t quite agree with the Padre on the matter of Sin and punishment, nonetheless finds he is unable to offer a rival system of his own. This is where authorial irony impinges on the novel’s entire structure. For Hopkins, defending the cantonment was performed in the name of a principle which he now finds it impossible to live by. What he called civilisation involved, he now realises, the violent enslavement of foreign people. Thinking about the “chains and fetters, manacles and shackles” on display at the Exhibition, he decides that “he should have thought a great deal more about lay behind the exhibits.” Lay behind?Only one use unites those objects. Hopkins’s erstwhile zeal about the British mission and necessary ignorance of its darker side is exaggerated far past the point of plausibility in order to depict his personal and moral change. He is left, in the book’s slightly enigmatic but by this point surely redundant and somewhat nullifyingly shrug-like final words, reflecting on the idea that a nation does not in reality create itself according its own “best ideas” but is shaped by “other forces” — “of which,” we are told, “it has little knowledge.”