A writer from elsewhere

JIM FARRELL wanted to write a big book. This was after his early published work - A Man From Elsewhere, A Girl in the Head - gained him admiration, but not a vast readership, and a reputation as a comer but neither the huge advances from publishers nor the kind of fame he hungered for. Casting around for a subject that would be his War and Peace he first considered writing about de Gaulle or alternatively, a book based in Mexico.

Then he was gripped by the idea of writing a great Indian novel, based on the "1857 Mutiny", that empathising with the colonised (i.e us) to an extent never attempted before. Farrell had an interesting way of working. Assembling the facts and structure of his novels from secondary sources, he would visit the place he had written about after the book was done to confirm what he had imagined. He followed the same procedure for his India book, travelling to India once it was more or less mapped out. The subcontinent came as a considerable shock.

He wandered through Bombay, Jaipur, Agra, Dehra Dun, Hardwar, Mussoorie and finally arrived in Lucknow where he found the "once-imposing Residency heralded by evil-smelling drains". After Lucknow, it was Calcutta, Kathmandu, Patna, Khajuraho, and then home to England. He confessed to friends that he had failed to arrive at any real understanding of India. A couple of years after the Booker Prize winning The Siege of Krishnapur was published, Farrell said to Harry Keating, the author of the Inspector Ghote books that he had been to India but wished he had not. "I had a firmer idea of what India was about," he explained in his careful way, "before I went."

The above anecdote is one of many to be found in Lavinia Greacen's fascinating biography, J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer (Bloomsbury). I picked the book off a shelf at random, having no real intention of reading it (I had read The Siege of Krishnapur too long ago to remember any of it and had not encountered The Singapore Grip, his other important novel), but after glancing through a few pages I was firmly hooked and read the biography at one sitting. As one of the book's reviewers suggests, read this book first, then read Farrell's Empire trilogy, it is bound to be a rewarding experience.

Jim Farrell died young, at age 44, lost at sea during a storm, while out fishing. There is no telling what heights he might have scaled in his literary career had he lived, but on the evidence of what he left behind he might well have come to be regarded as one of the greatest writers of his time. But more than the author's description of his efforts to hone his craft, rewarding though these are, what I found gripping was her reconstruction of his life.

J.G. Farrell was as complex, neurotic and obsessive as any writer who has ever lived. Adding to his angst was the fact that he had been a robust athletic sort at school before he was struck down by polio. His experience of illness cast a long shadow, and informed much of his early writing. He was also a loner who avoided forming any lasting stable relationships.

Good-looking and enigmatic he romanced a host of stunning women but refused to be landed by any of them. As one of his contemporaries mused, "The memorial service was full of the best- looking women in publishing".

Greacen's ability to reconstruct Farrell's life compellingly should surely win the novelist a whole new generation of admirers. This is one writer who will not be forgotten in a hurry.

DAVID DAVIDAR

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Airport nightmare
Next     : Kidding whom?