The Siege of Krishnapur

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In the Spring of 1857, with India on the brink of a violent and bloody mutiny, Krishnapur is a remote town on the vast North Indian plain. For the British there, life is orderly and genteel. Then the sepoys at the nearest military cantonment rise in revolt and the British community retreats with shock into the Residency. They prepare to fight for their lives with what weapons they can muster. As food and ammunition grow short, the Residency, its defences battered by shot and shell and eroded by the rains, becomes ever more vulnerable.

The Siege of Krishnapur is a modern classic of narrative excitement that also digs deep to explore some fundamental questions of civilisation and life.

'Suspense and subtlety, humour and horror, the near-neighbourliness of heroism and insanity: it is rare to find such divergent elements being controlled in one hand and being raced, as it were, in one yoke. But Farrell manages just this here: his imaginative insight and technical virtuosity combine to produce a novel of quite outstanding quality' The Times

'The magnificient passages of action in The Siege of Krishnapur , its gallery of characters, its unashamedly detailed and fascinating dissertations on cholera, gunnery, phrenology, the prodigal inventiveness of its no doubt also well-documented scenes should satisfy the most exacting and voracious reader. For a novel to be witty is one thing, to tell a good story is another, to be serious is yet another, but to be all three is surely enough to make it a masterpiece' John Spurling, New Statesman

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

An isolated British garrison falls prey to the 1857 Sepoy rebellion. The native Indian mutineers never really figure in this semicomic tapestry of colonial types: the image is rather that of black insects swarming over a white body. (When this literally happens to one Englishwoman her young rescuers are perplexed as to whether her pubic hair is human or verminous -- Farrell's idea of a stout anti-Victorian joke.) The besieged officials sustain a teatime bravado amidst cholera and stench and swelter; their leader is an outside rationalist called the Collector, a derisory, pontificating sponsor of the Queen's Progress. Farrell's refusal to romanticize teeming India is matched by his inability to mount the least of moving insights. Like his characters, he believes in phrenology, tracing the bumps and concavities of a singular time and place without penetrating its humanity. Farrell has an admiring audience in England -- he's a good writer if never able to overcome a certain aridity -- as in the earlier novels Troubles and A Girl in the Head. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.