J.G. Farrell

Reading historical fiction is almost always profitable for the reader. In exchange for just a basic knowledge of the period in question, the reader reaps the benefits of the author's extensive research into the nuances and details often found as too dry to make an impact in non-fiction texts. An intimate feel for the period and its peoples leads one to understand so much better what really shaped an event. There is no better author of historical fiction than was J. G. Farrell.

J.G. Farrell's Empire Trilogy (1970-78)ranges from the Sepoy Mutiny in India, through World War I and Ireland's Easter, 1916 rebellion, and then on to World War II in the Far East. In these three novels, Ferrell paints an unequaled portrait of the folly of empire.

The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), which won the Man Booker Prize in 1973, takes place in India in 1857 and tells the story of the Great Mutiny when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. Set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent, this novel exposes colonial ambitions that is all at once brutal, blundering and wistful. And, as it followed Ferrell's earlier work on the Irish mutiny one can't help understanding that Ferrell saw these events as linked in concept if not in time and place. Troubles (1970) is at once a hilarious and heartbreaking master work which takes place in Kilnalough, Ireland set during the 1916 Easter Rebellion. It is a sad, tragic and very funny tale exemplifying the human heart of insurrection. The last of the trilogy, The Singapore Grip (1978), is a love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life. It explores the boundaries between classes and nations through the figures of the business community in Singapore directly before the Japanese invasion.

It is always audacious to explain a two hundred and fifty-year span of history but Ferrell's ambition seems to be more an attempt at explaining the human failings of the British Raj than any actual history. The Brits, in Ferrell's estimation, watched the Sun set over their empire owning class blinders and arrogant disdain for any who let them rule.

Perhaps ironically, in 1979 while fishing, a rogue wave not unlike the Sepoy Mutiny or the Rising, or the inevitable defeat arising from a lack of foresight, as in Singapore, swept Ferrell, age 44, off of a rock and to his death in the Irish sea. His death stunned the literary community and one cannot help but mourn the many great works died with him.