James Gordon Farrell (25 January 1935 — 11 August 1979), known as J.G. Farrell, was a Liverpool-born novelist of Irish descent. Farrell gained prominence for his historical fiction, most notably his Empire Trilogy (Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip), dealing with the political and human consequences of British colonial rule. The Siege of Krishnapur won the 1973 Booker Prize. On 19 May 2010 it was announced that Troubles had won the Lost Booker Prize, awarded to works that missed out on consideration due to a rule change in 1970. If Farrell had won the Booker in 1970 he would have been the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, but J. M. Coetzee was first in 1999 and Peter Carey was second in 2001.
Farrell, born in Liverpool into a family of Anglo-Irish background, was the second of three brothers. His father, William Farrell, had worked as an accountant in Bengal and in 1929, he married Prudence Josephine Russell, who was a former receptionist and secretary to a doctor. From the age of 12 he attended Rossall public school in Lancashire. After World War II, the Farrells moved to Dublin, and from this point on Farrell spent much time in Ireland: this, perhaps combined with the popularity of Troubles, leads many to treat him as an Irish writer. After leaving Rossall, he taught in Dublin and also worked for some time on Distant Early Warning Line in the Canadian Arctic. In 1956 he went to study at Brasenose College, Oxford; while there he contracted polio. This would leave him partially crippled and disease would be prominent in his works. In 1960 he left Oxford with Third-degree honors French and Spanish and went to live in France, where he taught at a lycée.
Farrell published his first novel, A Man From Elsewhere, in 1963. Set in France, it shows the clear influence of French existentialism. The story follows Sayer, who is a journalist for a communist paper, as he tries to find skeletons in Regan's closet. Regan is a dying novelist who is about to be awarded an important Catholic literary prize. The book mimics the fight between the two of the leaders of French existentialism: Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (Sayer representing Sartre and Regan representing Camus). The two argue about existentialism: the position that murder can be vindicated as an expedient in overthrowing tyranny (Sartre) versus the stance that there are no ends that justify unjust means (Camus). Bernard Bergonzi reviewed it in the New Statesman in the September 20, 1963 issue and said, "Many first novels are excessively autobiographical, but A Man from Elsewhere suffers from the opposite fault of being a cerebral construct, dreamed up out of literature and the contemporary French cinema." Simon Raven wrote in The Observer on September 15, 1963 that "Mr. Farrell's style is spare, his plotting lucid and well timed; his expositions of moral or political problems are pungent if occasionally didactic." It entirely lacks the ironic humour and the tender appreciation of human frailty which characterise his later work. Farrell himself came to dislike the book.
Two years after this came The Lung, in which Farrell returned to his real-life trauma of less than a decade earlier: the main character Martin Sands contracts polio and has to spend a long period in hospital. It has been noted that it somewhat modeled after Farrell, but it is modeled more after Geoffrey Firmin from Malcolm Lowry 1947 novel, Under the Volcano. The anonymous reviewer for The Observer on October 31, 1965, wrote that "Mr. Farrell gives the pleasantly solid impression of really having something to write about" and one for The Times Literary Supplement on November 11, 1965 that "Mr. Farrell's is an effective, potent brew, compounded of desperation and a certain wild hilarity."
In 1967 he published A Girl in the Head. The protagonist, the impoverished Polish count Boris Slattery, lives in the fictional English seaside town of Maidenhair Bay, in the house of the Dongeon family (which is believed to be modeled after V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas). His marriage to Flower Dongeon is decaying. His companion is Dr. Cohen, who is a dying alcoholic. Boris also has sex with an underaged teenager, June Furlough. He also fantasizes about Ines, a Swedish summer guest, who is the "girl in the head". Boris is believed to be modeled after Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Like its two predecessors, the book met only middling critical and public reaction. In the July 13, 1967 issue of The Listener, Ian Hamilton wrote that he disliked the novel, and thought it was, at best, an "adroit pastiche" of Samuel Beckett's deadbeats. Martin Levin wrote in The New York Times Book Review on March 23, 1969, that he praised the author's "flair for giving the ridiculous an inspired originality". In an anonymous review in The New York Times Book Review on July 20, 1967, the writer stated that the "verbal assurance and resourcefulness show that Mr. Farrell is not content to coast along merely imitating his previous work. Such a deliberate extension of range is perhaps a hopeful sign for a talent which, after three novels, still has not found the mode in which to fulfil its attractive promise."
Troubles tells the comic yet melancholy tale of an English Major, Brendan Archer who in 1919 goes to County Waterford in Ireland to meet the woman whom he believes he may be engaged to marry. From the crumbling Majestic Hotel at Kilnalough he watches Ireland's fight for independence from Britain. Farrell wrote this book on a Harkness Fellowship to the United States and finished it in a tiny flat in Knightsbridge, London. He got the idea for the setting from going to Block Island and seeing the remains of an old burned-down hotel. He won a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for the novel and with the money travelled to India to research his next novel.
Farrell's next book The Siege of Krishnapur and his last completed work The Singapore Grip continue his story of the collapse of British colonial power. The former deals with the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The novel is set in Krishnapur where Mr. Hopkins, a high-ranking civil servant notices unrest in the populace and decides to fortify his house. Hopkins was a supporter of The Great Exhibition and has a lot of valuables in his residence. Eventually he is rescued when a British force makes the rebels retreat.
The three novels are thematically linked, although Archer a character in Troubles reappears in The Singapore Grip. In Farrell's unfinished novel, The Hill Station Dr McNab is the protagonist, this novel and its accompanying notes make the series a quartet.
When The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker Prize in 1973 Farrell used his acceptance speech to attack the sponsors for their business activities. A Different Stripe: The Best of the Booker: The Siege of Krishnapur
Charles Sturridge scripted a film version of Troubles made for British television in 1988 and directed by Christopher Morahan. Troubles (1988) (TV)
In 1979 Farrell decided to quit London to take up residence on the Sheep's Head peninsula in southwestern Ireland. A few months later he drowned in Bantry Bay, apparently while angling. He was 44. He is buried in the cemetery of St. James's Church of Ireland church in Durrus.
The manuscript library at Trinity College, Dublin holds his papers: Papers of James Gordon Farrell (1935—1979). TCD MSS 9128-60.
Peter Morey wrote that "an interpretation of the novels of J. G. Farrell and Paul Mark Scott as examples of post-colonial fiction [is possible], since both partake of oppositional and interrogative narrative practices which recognize and work to dismantle the staple elements of imperial narrative."
Ronald Binns said of Farrell: "probably the most ambitious literary project conceived and executed by any British novelist in the 1970s."
Also, in the 1984 novel Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, Vinnie Miner, the protagonist, reads a Farrell novel on her flight from New York to London. Also, in the 1991 novel The Gates of Ivory by Margaret Drabble, the writer Stephen Cox is modeled after Farrell.
Farrell said to George Brock in an interview for The Observer Magazine "that the really interesting thing that's happened during my lifetime has been the decline of the British Empire."
1979 Bernard Bergonzi, The Contemporary English Novel
1981 John Spurling, Margaret Drabble, Malcolm Dean: Personal Memories of J.G. Farrell; The Hill Station
1986 Ronald Binns, J.G. Farrell. London and New York : Methuen. ISBN 0416403204
1997 Michael C. Prusse, "Tomorrow is Another Day": The Fictions of James Gordon Farrell
1997 Derek Mahon: "The World of J.G. Farrell", (poem), October 1997
1999 Lavinia Greacen: J.G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer (full-length biography). London : Bloomsbury. ISBN 0747544638
2000 Elisabeth Delattre: "Histoire et fiction dans Troubles de J.G.Farrell", Études Irlandaises, printemps 2000, n° 25-1, pp. 65—80
2002 Elisabeth Delattre: "Du Monde romanesque au poème : 'The World of J.G.Farrell' de Derek Mahon ", Études Irlandaises, printemps 2002, n° 27-1, pp. 93—105
2003 Elisabeth Delattre: "Intégrer, exclure ou la genèse d'une ?uvre : Troubles de J.G.Farrell", in Irlande : Inclusion, exclusion, publié sous la direction de Françoise Canon-Roger, Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2003, pp. 65—80.
2003 Michael C. Prusse "British and Irish Novelists Since 1960". Gale : Detroit. ISBN 978-0-7876-6015-4
2007 John McLeod, J.G. Farrell, Tavistock: Northcote House, 2007. ISBN 0-7463-0986-4
2009 Lavinia Greacen: JG Farrell in His Own Words Selected Letters and Diaries. Cork : Cork University Press. ISBN 9781859184288
