Excellent
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An excellent book telling of the mutiny. Whilst the book almost neglects the natives this isn't fiction dressed up as colonial propaganda. This is an incredibly humorous tale of a group of Englishmen trapped within a residency, besieged by a whole host of natives. As the siege progresses civilization, science and religion are all discussed along with the odd smattering of phrenology. An incredibly entertaining book and one very worth reading.
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The Raj must go on ...
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An amazing story - Life continues as normal for the colonial outpost at Krishnapur with poetry readings and all the trappings of genteel society back in England. But there the comparisons with 'Carry on up the Khyber' stop once the Sepoys start their siege. It all becomes grim, dirty, diseased and everyone is forced to find their hidden reserves of strength as the food rations start to run out.
This winner of the Booker Prize from 1973 is full of strong characterisation, and doesn't shy away from describing the decay and rotting from the high body count and cholera with attendant vultures and jackals.
Its style has similarities with A.S.Byatt's Victorian romances, but also has a sense of humour throughout in that life must go on!
A dense but fabulous novel.
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Interesting but dull in places
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Personally I don't understand what all the fuss around the book is about. I mean it was alright, interesting insight into that life with some excellent characters and plots. I just found that it dragged, the start was very slow and when it continued to change pace I became disinterested in stories that could have been riveting.
Possibly I have a different view as I had to study this book for A-levels against another book that I much preferred. Being young as well some of the deeper philosophical points may have been lost on me. I loved the characters indeed though I would have liked to have known whether it was Harry who got Lucy pregnant and several more little mysteries but sometimes that is the fun. I think the story is good but it's long-winded if you want detailed characters you get it, the main narrator is very observant. I would say it reminds me a little of Gabriel Garcia in places but that said I enjoyed Love in the Time of Cholera immensely and this not much at all.
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Stunning achievement
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The Great Mutiny in 1857 has been a major inspiration for writers of fiction (and non-fiction too off course). Some of those fictional books I've read, though by far not all (has anyone read them all?), but never have I been as impressed by one as by `The siege of Krishnapur'.
This is really a most extraordinary book. I may perhaps not read it as people born and bred in England (to them Krishnapur is probably a household-name and a legendary part of their national history) but in fact this matters little. `The siege of Krishnapur' is much much more than a book about the siege of that particular place. The entire story is told from the point of view of a number of the English residents, while the sepoys are merely present as a part of the setting (almost as the summer heat, the monsoon rains, the bugs, ...). And it is in the description of these characters and their thoughts and feelings that this book surpasses all others I've read. Mr. Hopkins (the Collector), Mr. Willoughby (the Magistrate), George Fleury, Harry Dunstable, the Padre, and many more, will impress themselves upon you as if you know them in the flesh.
Their near-sighted views of most everything (the `civilizing' influence of British rule over India and science's progress, the roles of men versus women), their stubborn adherence to `proper' conduct and society's rules and regulations ever after 3 months of siege, the proverbial British phlegm in the face of desperate odds, it is all described with such an incomparable style and vocabulary to make these people both tragic, heroic, and - oddest perhaps of all - at times extremely humorous.
One of the best books I've read in years.
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DEATH, WHERE IS THY POINT?
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Chapatis. It is always difficult to start a novel convincingly, but it's a long time since I saw it done better than it is here. The harbinger of the brutal and bloody Indian uprising of 1857 was, in this narrative at least, the secret distribution of chapatis to the intended victims. I have long forgotten what little I may ever have known about these events, and I would actually be delighted to discover that this detail was not an invention of the novelist's but what actually happened.
If paraphrased, the amount of gore and squalor that is detailed here on page after page would seem grotesque and even intolerable. As told by Farrell, it manages to be neither. This was the Victorian era, and the story is a scenario of British Victorians subjected to pressure and strain of near-incredible ferocity. The author does not spare us the specifics, and it will be a long time before I forget the spongy piles of corpses, the sense of near-unbearable heat in which I for one would have had difficulty in even wearing the stuffy formal clothes let alone dancing let alone battling for my very life, the pervasive stench, the outbreak of cholera and the indelible vignette of the lapdog chewing the face off a fallen defender. Even more extraordinary, to me, than the way they keep going is what they don't do and in particular what they think and don't think. There is no real instance of irrational panic whatsoever, and although the Padre for one has clearly gone slightly round the bend, the way this manifests itself is in an obsessional fixation with denouncing Sin and Heresy, and largely with his frantic concern to prove that great Victorian preoccupation The Existence of God from something like Aquinas's Argument from Design.
At the height of the horror, the Collector is still thinking in Victorian vocabulary and expressing himself in subordinate clauses. Staring death in the eye, the young intellectual Fleury is still concerned with his theories, whether in respect of the operation of guns or of the progress of rationalism. The ladies themselves, who might have been expected to be in a state of blind terror, are still weighing up the niceties of how the matrons and widows on the one hand, and the Fallen Woman on the other, are expected to comport themselves. Most amazingly of all, when the cholera first breaks out the two doctors conduct a lengthy and articulate debate on its causes and remedies, keeping the attention not just of each other but of an attentive audience.
The book abounds in unforgettable incidents - the smothering cloud of cockchafer beetles, the snowstorm, the slaughter of one rebel contingent with silver forks from the dining-room and marble busts of Socrates and Keats - but what is distinctive and extraordinary about this book is its tone. Its tone is quiet, detached and wry without being aggressively ironic. No heavy lessons are preached (although it's not hard to see which side the author is on when it comes to religion). No particular political standpoint is adopted either, the nearest we get to that being the shoulder-shrugging last paragraph. The whole saga ought to have been a filthy nightmare, but instead the reader feels rather like the onlookers who have come along with picnic lunches to watch the events as if they were watching a game of cricket. It has all been Virgil's 'plurima mortis imago' - the omnipresent face of death, and yet it has been a bit of a spectator-sport too. I'm actually rather glad I'm no historian in this instance. I don't know what set off the uprising, and once the relief forces turn up so far as I know things went back to much as they were before. The author offers us no theories or explanations: he just leaves us having witnessed wholesale and insensate slaughter and wondering what it can all have been in aid of.
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