The Anglo-Irish novelist JG Farrell would have been ninety in January had he not drowned in August 1979 while fishing in Bantry Bay. It was an anniversary that passed without comment. The harsh legacy of polio, contracted in Farrell’s first year at Oxford, renders it unlikely that he would have reached old age, but what if he had? Contemporaries of Farrell such as John Fowles, Paul Scott and the slightly older Angus Wilson all enjoyed critical and commercial success in the final decades of the last century, and yet today their fiction is scarcely read; the authors of ‘classics’ in print and on screen, such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Raj Quartet, are now deeply unfashionable, dismissed for projecting obsolete ideas and attitudes. Farrell no longer enjoys a mass audience (did he ever?) and yet his reputation has survived into the twenty-first century, the likes of Salman Rushdie and John Banville lamenting the premature loss of a truly great writer. In an era of ‘decolonising’ the canon and the curriculum a novel like Scott’s award-winning Staying On appears archaic in its depiction of post-independence India; and yet Farrell’s ‘Empire Trilogy’ still stand as key texts of postcolonial literature: in 2008 The Siege of Krishnapur came close to winning the ‘Best of Booker’ vote and in 2010 Troubles effortlessly won the ‘Lost Booker Prize’ [for 1970 when a rule change had meant no competition], while in 2020 a big budget serialisation of The Singapore Grip on terrestrial TV gained extensive media coverage. Nor is this fashionable unfashionability a uniquely British and Irish phenomenon. Farrell spent long periods in France and in the United States, loudly lamenting his failure to break through in either country; posthumously, French and American critics applauded his ability to convey with humour and lightness of touch the fractious nature of imperial pomp (each of the ‘Empire Trilogy is an NYRB Classic).
Ironically, Farrell’s earliest novels, particularly the Lolita-like A Girl In The Head, would generate fierce criticism were they still in print. The same might be true of the man himself if his selected letters and diaries, and Lavinia Greacen’s 1999 biography, were better known: he was immensely popular, and yet his treatment of multiple girlfriends left a lot to be desired. Those same girlfriends were generously unforgiving, even in his lifetime. Shocked by his sudden death Farrell’s wider circle of friends swiftly memorialised him: in dedications (Olivia Manning), in state-of-the-nation poetry (Derek Mahon) and in novels (Alison Lurie, and most especially Margaret Drabble). In 1981 appeared The Hill Station, an unfinished fictional return to nineteenth-century India complemented by insightful reflections on the man and his work. Rereading Farrell’s ‘Empire Trilogy’ prompts a succession of questions. How do surviving friends like Drabble and Hilary Spurling view him today – was he an English or an Irish writer, or distinctively Anglo-Irish, and what relationship if any does he have to contemporary Ireland’s astonishing array of novelists? South Dublin and rural Cork are wholly different from the locales Farrell knew in his formative years and final days, so can we in any way speculate on how he would have adapted to the fundamental shifts in Irish culture and society witnessed across the past thirty years? My gut feeling is that he would effortlessly have accommodated dramatically changing times, helped by his outsider status within Irish society (no having to accommodate a guilt-ridden Catholic upbringing, or sense of personal responsibility for the Church’s worst failings).
It’s also worth asking how Farrell’s novels have lived on inside and outside the academy; today are they better known courtesy of TV and radio? Between 2000 and 2010 the BBC’s Radio 4 dramatised or serialised all three novels of the ‘Empire Trilogy’. With David Lean and others keen to film The Siege of Krishnapur, Farrell confidently anticipated his books one day transferring to the big screen. They never did, but in 1988 London Weekend recruited a stellar cast and production crew to make a well-received two-part adaptation of Troubles. Thirty-two years later ITV commissioned an old associate of ‘Jim’, Christopher Hampton, to write a six-part screenplay of The Singapore Grip. Why was this expensive prime-time production such an obvious failure; unlike Troubles, made at a high-water mark for British television drama?
Farrell’s publisher seized on the screening and streaming of The Singapore Grip to assert his relevance to an era of identity politics and global realignment. Here was a carefully orchestrated revival of an ostensibly forgotten novelist. Yet arguably he’s never gone away, both in the British Isles and in North America. Since 1979 a succession of books and essays have examined Farrell’s work from every angle; yet few if any have considered his continuing presence in our national conversation when the likes of Scott and Fowles are more and more forgotten. Here was a writer inspired by his lengthy stays in the United States, on easy terms with East Coast movers and shakers (he studied drama at Yale with Sam Shephard) and eager to observe America’s fast-fading presence in south-east Asia. Farrell has a continued presence among British, Irish and American readers – a presence which, in what would have been his ninetieth year, deserves serious recognition and consideration.
