Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (141 page)

As Potter later observed, on reading
Krishnapur
, none of this golden crew knew the burly young undergraduate at Brasenose. Why should they? Oiks like Farrell came in bunches of fifteen. One only took notice of them when they came back sloshed on Saturday nights and honked on the stairs. On 28 November 1956, the height of the season, Jim Farrell had a bad game. He didn’t feel right in the changing room afterwards, ‘cut the usual drinking session’, took a bus back to college and crawled fully clothed into bed. He had polio. Six days later he was in an ‘iron lung’, that life-saving apparatus which was half Edgar Allan Poe’s
Buried Alive
and half medieval torture-rack. Salk’s vaccine became widely available six months later, and the iron lung would join the hook-hand in the medical museum. In his 1965 novel,
The Lung
, he gives a graphic description of the virus’s early flu symptoms, suicidal disarrangement of the mind, physical collapse and the ultimate horror: ‘a white metal box on wheels. Any similarity between this box and a coffin was purely
coincidental.’ But, as the novel graphically relates, it isn’t. When he was recovered sufficiently for ‘physio’, he was three stone lighter and had shoulders that, to his mortification, he heard one girl call ‘flabby’. It was like the Charles Atlas strip-advertisement in reverse: the husky young athlete had become a 90-pound weakling. ‘Jim Farrell’ became ‘J. G. Farrell’: an ‘outsider’, in the term popularised by Colin Wilson that same year. No longer a player, he became a spectator. The novelist happened.

Farrell was advised that law would be too demanding for him and, having transferred to Modern Languages, scraped a third in 1960. The setback did not upset him as he had already resolved to write. That was what outsiders did best. Over the next few years, he scraped by on various teaching jobs abroad and travelling fellowships, compensating for his disability by sexual athleticism, running three or four girlfriends at the same time (one of the side-show attractions of Greacen’s biography is reading between the lines for the well-known literary ladies who at various times warmed Farrell’s bed). Women fell for the slim, nerve-wracked, good looks. He was, says Robert Harris, ‘the Great Shagger of English Literary Fiction, 1960–79’. For his part, he would never commit to any one woman. Unfaithful in love, Farrell was steadfast to the muse. As Wordsworth put it, what the writer needs above all is ‘independence and resolution’. In one of his letters to a girlfriend, Farrell wrote, ‘One has to be lonely in order to get up the steam to write fiction.’ Nowhere had he been lonelier than in the white box.

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.

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.