Farrell’s first ventures in fiction did nothing to separate him from the thousands of would-be novelists every year who try their luck and get nowhere. A Man from Elsewhere (1963), The Lung (1965) and A Girl in the Head (1967) were all apprentice works. Reviewers were variously cool, snide or wholly unnoticing. He kept body and soul together with support from his publisher, Jonathan Cape, and a fellowship to study in America. He was never, as Greacen testifies, a well-read novelist (he did not discover Dickens until a few years before his death, for example). But over these formative years two writers were particularly influential on him: Richard Hughes and Malcolm Lowry. In honour of the second he made a visit to Mexico.
Farrell, meanwhile, was mining his own family background – the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, the Anglo-Indian professional classes, the army officer caste. He was a pioneer in what is now called ‘post-colonial fiction’, that genre born out of the exhaustions and guilt of Empire. Sprightlier than Paul Scott, his fiction was less consciously ‘post-modern’ than that of Salman Rushdie, an admirer. He offered ‘a good read’, while taking the novel into interesting new fields. Late in his career, in conversation with his friend Paul Barker, he said the biggest thing to have happened in his life was the decline of the British Empire – but he did not lament that decline.
Novelists, like generals, need luck. Farrell’s story of the aftermath of the Irish uprising, and the battles between the IRA and the Black and Tans, Troubles, came out in 1970, a few months after Ulster exploded into flames. Few novels have been more timely. Despite some sniffy reviews, the novel was generally applauded, but his oddly comic tone (a cross between Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse, as one critic neatly put it) is very much an acquired taste. At the centre of Troubles’ narrative is the statutory big house – in this case the Majestic Hotel. Its decay, under its fanatically pro-Union owner, Edward Spencer, is a metaphor for the decay of the Ascendancy. A moment in its final crumbling gives the distinctive tang of Farrell’s narrative:
One unseasonably warm day the giant M of Majestic detached itself from the façade of the building and fell four storeys to demolish a small table at which a very old and very deaf lady, an early arrival for Christmas, had decided to take tea in the mild sunshine that was almost like summer. She had looked away for a moment, she explained to Edward in a very loud voice (almost shouting, in fact), trying to remember where the floral clock had been in the old days. She had maybe closed her eyes for a moment or two. When she had turned back to her tea, it had gone! Smashed to pieces by this strange, seagull-shaped piece of cast iron (she luckily had not recognised it or divined where it had come from).
If ever there were an argument for supporting the Arts Council, it is found in the next phase of Farrell’s career. He was, at this period, chronically broke. On the strength of Troubles he was given an Arts Council fellowship of £750, which he used to follow up research he had done in the British Museum to travel (third-class all the way) across India. The novel which ensued, The Siege of Krishnapur, went on to win the Booker Prize in 1973. This middle section of what came to be known as the ‘Empire Trilogy’ (not Farrell’s description and ‘anti-Empire’ would be more apt) is based on an actual siege in northern India. It describes the upholders of the Raj – principally the Collector, the Magistrate, the Soldier, the Poet, the Padre – going patriotically lunatic as they fight off the sepoy hordes. After months of holding out, the relieving force discovers survivors indistinguishable, as one of the officers observes, from ‘untouchables’. As in most of Farrell’s fiction, there is no overwhelmingly sympathetic character and a bitter comedy which perplexes as much as it amuses. In the last desperate stages of the siege, for example, the British defenders have run out of cannonballs and use the heads from busts of literary figures in the Residency:
And of the heads, perhaps not surprisingly, the most effective of all had been Shakespeare’s; it had scythed its way through a whole astonished platoon of sepoys advancing in single file through the jungle. The Collector suspected that the Bard’s success in this respect might have a great deal to do with the ballistic advantages stemming from his baldness.
The Empire can still strike back.
Like John Berger the year before, Farrell used his prizewinner’s speech to attack the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’, incarnated in the donor firm which had made its millions out of sweated labour in the West Indies. Every year, he jested, Booker should expect an ever more horrible monster washed up on its prize shores. Novelists were not company men. None the less the bad manners and bad headlines were, as always with Booker, good publicity.
Farrell, only thirty-eight, was suddenly – as authors go – rich and famous. He sold the film rights to his novel, fired his agent and went into tax exile in Kilcrohane, county Cork, in 1979. Here, living close to the land and the sea, and beyond the call of the telephone, he found, for the first time, douceur de vivre. He managed one more great novel before going into tax exile, The Singapore Grip (1978), about the ignominious surrender in 1942 which marked the end for the British Empire. As Robert Harris observes, ‘his theme is chaos, and the ceaseless attempts of a hypocritical society to keep it at bay’. At the time the novel received disappointing reviews, but has lasted and been revalued more generously. Farrell was at work on a sequel to The Siege of Krishnapur at the time of his death. It was tidied up and published, posthumously, as The Hill Station in 1981.
There was enough juice in the death-throes of the British Empire to have kept Farrell going for many more decades – but it was not to be. Having, belatedly, developed a taste for his fiction, the world would be denied more of it. Lavinia Greacen’s biography makes much of the strange episode of Farrell’s death, aged only forty-four, on 11 August 1979. He was fishing in high seas near his home in southwest Ireland and was knocked off the rock on which he was standing by a wave, falling into the water. It was stormy (the same storm which would later drown fifteen contestants in the Fastnet yacht race). What was odd, according to witnesses, was that Farrell made no effort to save himself. He did not shout for help and his body was only recovered six weeks later. In 2010, the year in which he won the so-called ‘Lost Man Booker Prize’ (for the missing year, 1970) with Troubles, a belated witness report only added to the mystery of his end. Was it suicide? An IRA hit? Is J. G. Farrell, like Elvis, still alive? In all probability, what killed him was the long-term debility of his polio: he was too weak to save himself. What made him a writer killed him.
FN
James Gordon Farrell
MRT
The Siege of Krishnapur
Biog
L. Greacen, J. G. Farrell, the Making of a Writer (1999)
POSTSCRIPT
269. George MacDonald Fraser 1925–2008
It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whore-mongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not so far off the mark. Harry Flashman’s view of his trade
There is a moment – hilarious and darkly symbolic – in The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) where the central character, the Collector (i.e. the officer charged with extorting revenue from the colony for the East India Company) stands under the cantonment’s flagpole as it is hit by a rebel cannonball. The Union Jack falls on him and he finds himself ‘struggling on his back with the stifling presence of the flag wrapped round him like a shroud’. It has the typical Farrell tang – high comedy and savage anti imperialism. The flag is not lowered, ceremonially; it falls down ignominiously.
It was common, after the success of The Siege of Krishnapur, to compare Farrell with John Fowles, whose The French Lieutenant’s Woman came out three years earlier. In fact there is a closer analogy to be found in George MacDonald Fraser’s comic fiction. Fraser’s first novel, Flashman, was published in 1969. Oddly, in view of his later success, Fraser had huge difficulty finding a publisher for his manuscript and the book
finally came out under the imprint of one of the more obscure, but more perceptive, London firms, Barrie and Jenkins.
Fraser’s basic idea was beguilingly simple. Flashman is the utter cad in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). Thomas Hughes’s novel begins with a long prelude praising the ‘Browns of England’ who – to continue the chromatic theme – had covered a third of the globe imperial red. If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, as the proverb put it, the British Empire was built in classrooms of Rugby, as reformed under the formidable hand and cane of Dr Thomas Arnold in the late 1830s. In Hughes’s novel, Harry Flashman is the degenerate school bully. In one central scene he roasts Brown, his junior, over a fire. He finally meets his condign fate when, having drunk himself stupid, he is brought back to school insensible on a hurdle. The Doctor expels him. We know what happens to Tom Brown after this: he becomes cock of the school, goes on to Oxford, and does great things for Queen and country. But what happens to Flashman? This is Fraser’s starting point in what would, over the next thirty years, become a twelve-volume series. Allegedly, the answer is to be found in the ‘Flashman Papers … discovered during a sale of household furniture at Ashby, Leicestershire, in 1965’. Mr Fraser, we apprehend, has been given the honour of ‘editing’ them.
Yellow to the core – but damnably lucky – Flashy is discovered to have ended up, in the opening volume, a hero of the first Afghan War. ‘Possibly there has been a greater shambles in the history of warfare,’ he observes, ‘probably there has not.’ In a final siege of an outpost in Jellalabad, his unconscious body is found by the relieving force wrapped in the regimental flag, dead bodies all around. It is assumed that this is an act of conspicuous gallantry. In fact he was intending to give it to the Afghans in the hope that they would spare him. He returns to England a national hero and is honoured with one of his monarch’s first Victoria Crosses. As he confesses, VD is more Flashy’s style.
His charmed, wholly disreputable career, has him riding into the Valley of Death, fighting at Little Big Horn (the only survivor), and – inevitably – saving his skin in the Indian Mutiny. He emerges from all such crises. As Fraser put it, ‘I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue – the unsparing honesty with which he admitted to his faults.’ Fraser’s models in his hugely entertaining saga were Rafael Sabatini (a ‘God’, whose Captain Blood Fraser read, aged ten) and Anthony Hope, the author of The Prisoner of Zenda, on which the successor to Flashman, Royal Flash (1970), is based.
Flashman was the book of the day and the business with the flag has striking similarities with Farrell’s episode in The Siege of Krishnapur. More interesting are the two authors’ similar views about Empire. Like Farrell, Fraser was clearly inspired by the wholly amazing collapse of the British Empire, which had been a supposedly permanent thing, between Harold Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ speech in 1960 and Denis Healey’s pull back from ‘East of Suez’ in 1967. In what was, historically, the blinking of an eye, it was gone. As Fraser observed:
No generation has seen their country so altered, so turned upside down, as children like me born in the 20 years between the two world wars … Other lands have known what seem to be greater upheavals, the result of wars and revolutions, but these do not compare with the experience of a country which passed in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all.
Not even Gibbon could have made it a dramatic story. It was not epic, nor tragic – only comedy would serve. The end of Empire was a peculiarly British, more specifically an English, event. It was something that the Irish and Scottish novelist, connected but not central, might be expected to see more clearly – and, to add to the comedy, that Americans had difficulty seeing at all. They never quite got the point. As Fraser recalled, ‘when Flashman appeared in the US in 1969, one-third of fortyodd critics accepted it as a genuine historical memoir. “The most important discovery since the Boswell papers” is the one that haunts me still … I’d never supposed that it would fool anybody … And fifty British critics had recognised it as a conceit.’
Fraser had come to such conceits late in life. He was born the son of a doctor and a nurse, in the historically uneasy borderlands between Scotland and England. His novels The Steel Bonnets (1971) and The Candlemass Road (1993) are set there. Genetically, he was from North of the Border and proud of it: ‘My forebears from the Highlands of Scotland were a fairly primitive, treacherous, blood-thirsty bunch and, as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, would have been none the worse for washing. Fine, let them be so depicted, if any film maker feels like it; better that than insulting, inaccurate drivel like Braveheart.’ He was educated at grammar school and had hopes of a medical career, but couldn’t pass his Latin exams. Aged eighteen, he volunteered for the Border Regiment in 1943 and fought with the ‘forgotten’ 14th army (as did fellow novelist Brian Aldiss) in Burma. He rose – somewhat inconsistently – through the ranks and was commissioned after the war into the Gordon Highlanders. He saw active service in such post-war hotspots as the Middle East and North Africa as the British Empire creaked on its way to dissolution. His military service is commemorated in the wry memoir Quartered Safe Out Here (1992) and his ‘McAuslan’ stories, which follow the career of the incorrigibly wayward Private John McAuslan, ‘the dirtiest soldier in the world’.
Fraser left the army in 1947 (the year that India left the Empire) to work as a journalist. He married a fellow journalist, Kathleen Hetherington, in 1949, and had three children. They emigrated to Canada in the early 1950s but returned after a year to Glasgow where Fraser embarked on a fifteen-year stint on the Glasgow Herald. He rose steadily from sub-editor to deputy editor but, failing to get the top job on the paper, he resolved, aged forty-four and encouraged by his wife, ‘to write his way out’ with a novel – Flashman as it would be. Drawing on his journalist’s fluency, ‘it took 90 hours, no advance plotting, no revisions, just tea and toast and cigarettes at the kitchen table’. After its insulting round of rejection by London’s major publishers, Flashman took off like a rocket. Fraser was, within a year, rich enough to take tax exile on the Isle of Man. Flashman volumes pulsed regularly from his typewriter as did even more lucrative film screenplays and other books – such as a homage to Sabatini, The Pyrates (1983) – which he had always wanted to write. One of the more interesting of his non-fiction works is The Hollywood History of the World (1988), in which he argued for popular film as a great educator as to the nature of the past. The argument applies to his own popular romance, founded as it is on impressive research, buttressed with owlishly pedantic footnotes to get up the nose of the academics.
Fraser had rather more mixed views about Empire than Farrell. He saw it as a gigantic fake, but admired the ‘standards and values’ which it generated – even Flashy behaves with decency, when the chips are down. He was, Fraser liked to say, a believer in – not an enemy of – the Empire and, with unusual appropriateness, was awarded an OBE in 1999. By this period he had become thoroughly brassed off with post-imperial Britain and, in 2008 (the Flashman saga having concluded in 2005), he loosed a final salvo:
The United Kingdom has begun to look more like a Third World country, shabby, littered, ugly, run down, without purpose or direction, misruled by a typical Third World government, corrupt, incompetent and undemocratic … I feel I speak not just for myself but for the huge majority of my generation who think as I do but whose voices are so often lost in the clamour. We are yesterday’s people, the over-the-hill gang. (Yes, the old people – not the senior citizens or the time-challenged, but the old people.) Those of ultra-liberal views may take consolation from this – that my kind won’t be around much longer, and then they can get on with wrecking civilisation in peace.
He wouldn’t be arou
nd much longer, dying a few months later of cancer through whose long affliction he had written a number of his later works.
FN
George MacDonald Fraser
MRT
Flashman
Biog
G. M. Fraser, The Light’s on at Signpost (2002)
270. David Lodge 1935–
I had been aware for some time (and you, gentle reader, have no doubt made the same observation) that I had not only strayed into a zone of Jamesian ironies as a result of writing Author, Author, but I was in some measure re-enacting the story of my own novel.
Those who have kept David Lodge company over the nearly fifty years of his novel-writing career will be able to construct a CV from the words on the fictional page, supplemented by throwaway comments in interviews and essays. Born in London, an only child, David was evacuated during the Blitz with his mother to the safety of the rural southwest. This figures in the opening, 1940s section of Out of the Shelter (1970). In The Year of Henry James (2006), Lodge discloses, in passing, that he is ‘a quarter Irish’. His publisher, Tom Rosenthal, liked to disclose that Lodge is ‘part Jewish’. His upbringing, however, was wholly Catholic: ‘My mother,’ he has written ‘was a dutiful but undemonstrative daughter of the Church.’ His father was ‘a jobbing musician’ who served in an RAF dance-band during the war, in a succession of remote but safe postings. The father of the hero in Deaf Sentence (2008), Lodge informs us, is as close a representation as is the hero himself (retired university professor of English with hearing problems) of Lodge Jr. In the novel, aged a frail ninety, Desmond’s dad lives in the same house that the Lodge family did, in Brockley, southeast London (‘Brickley’ in the novels). Desmond’s mother has been dead for a long while: she was ‘twenty-five years as an underpaid clerk in the office of a local builders’ merchant’ (if we follow the novel).
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 106