J.G. Farrell
born Jan. 23, 1935, Liverpool, Eng.
died Aug. 12, 1979, Bantry Bay, Ire.
British novelist who won acclaim for his
Empire trilogy, a series of historical
novels that intricately explore British
imperialism and its decline.
Farrell was born to an Irish mother and
an English father, and he spent much of his
childhood in Ireland. After attending
boarding school in Lancashire, Eng., he
studied at the University of Oxford, where
in 1960 he received a degree in French and
Spanish. While teaching at a lycée
(secondary school) in France, Farrell
started to write fiction. His debut novel, A
Man from Elsewhere (1963), a cerebral
narrative about a communist journalist
attempting to expose a celebrated writer’s
past, contains echoes of French
existentialism. He followed it with The Lung
(1965), in which he drew upon his own
affliction with polio, which he contracted
at Oxford, to present a downbeat portrait of
an irascible man confined to an iron lung.
On the strength of these two works, in 1966
Farrell won a fellowship to travel to the
United States. While in New York City he
published A Girl in the Head (1967), which
tells in seriocomic fashion the story of a
cynical eccentric living in an English
seaside town.
While Farrell received a modicum of
praise for these tales of contemporary
alienation, it was only after he turned his
attention to historical fiction that he
achieved wide renown. Becoming interested in
the collapse of the British Empire as a
cultural watershed, he embarked upon what
would eventually become a trilogy of
meticulously researched novels on the
subject. The first, Troubles (1970), focuses
on the struggle for Irish independence in
the years following World War I, with its
principal setting—the sprawling, run-down
Majestic Hotel—serving as a metaphor for the
dying empire. Though a rule change made the
novel (and all others published in 1970)
ineligible at the time for the Booker Prize,
in 2010 it received the Lost Man Booker
Prize, an honour (chosen by means of an
online public poll) meant to correct the
anomaly. In 1973, after spending time in
India, Farrell produced The Siege of
Krishnapur, a fictional treatment of the
1857–58 Indian Mutiny that blends a lively
adventure narrative with an unmistakable
critique of British Victorian values.
Esteemed by critics, it won the Booker
Prize. The Singapore Grip (1978), the final
novel in the series, ambitiously recounts
through both personal and political lenses
the Battle of Singapore during World War II,
in which the British colony fell to the
Japanese.
In 1979 Farrell drowned while fishing
near his home in Ireland. An unfinished
novel, The Hill Station, another examination
of British colonialism in India, was
published two years later.
John M. Cunningham
