![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a great book, not least for the depiction of its central character, The Collector. 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. The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker in 1973, and it was also shortlisted for Best of the Booker in 2008. Like his characters, he believes in phrenology, tracing the bumps and concavities of a singular time and place without penetrating its humanity. ![]() Farrell's refusal to romanticize teeming India is matched by his inability to mount the least of moving insights. (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. ![]() 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. But when the sepoys at the nearest military cantonment. An isolated British garrison falls prey to the 1857 Sepoy rebellion. In this remote town on the vast North Indian plain, life for the British is still orderly and genteel. ![]()
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