The Empire Trilogy: Troubles / The Siege of Krishnapur / The Singapore Grip

Empire Trilogy #1-3

by J.G. Farrell

The Empire Trilogy - consisting of the Lost Booker Prize-winning Troubles, the Booker Prize-winning The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip - is Farrell's re-examination of the legacy, and limits, of British imperial rule. The three volumes, connected by theme rather than character, and above all by their shared wit, brio, and daring, range in setting from the India of the Great Mutiny of 1857, to Ireland immediately after the Great War, to the besieged Singapore of World War II. Together the books constitute not only a spectacular entertainment but also an ambitious refashioning of the traditional historical novel to meet the tragic realities of the modern world.

The Siege of Krishnapur - India, 1857 - the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.Farrell's story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumors
of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion - at once brutal, blundering, and wistful - is soon revealed.

Troubles - 1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancée is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin. As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of "the troubles." 

· The Singapore Grip - Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming - what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett's price-fixing and market manipulation - but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical, India, Ebooks, Literature, Ireland

1241 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 2010

About the author

James Gordon Farrell, 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 Man Booker Prize, which was a prize created to recognize works published in 1970 (a group that had not previously been open for consideration due to a change in the eligibility rules at the time).

Farrell's career was cut short when he was drowned off the coast of Ireland at the age of 44.

Reviews

[Peter Jowers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally completed this trilogy. I liked Singapore Grip the best, which has led me to read now: Hero or Deserter about Gordon Bennett the commander of the Australian 8th Division in the Malayan campaign of 1941/42 leading to the fall of Singapore. Singapore Grip is a mixture of fictional characters‘ stories set in a well researched account of the above mentioned campaign.

The other two books: I preferred the Krishnapur one, a fictional town but the story may have been based on the siege of Lucknow. The Troubles, apparently a Booker Prize winner many years ago. I wondered if it really set out to tell the story of Anglo Irish troubles of 1920/22 or the troubled lives of those people living in a rambling old hotel! I know one reviewer got fed up with the characters very quickly and gave up after a few pages!

[Henry Kilvert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully chaotic

[Mbuye · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is rare to find book trilogies and quartets where one book doesn't overshadow the others. Such a trilogy is JG Farrell’s ‘Empire,’ where each novel in the series seems to outdo the next. The general theme is the fall of the British Empire in all parts of her colonies. Of the three areas chosen – Ireland, India and Singapore – different timelines and circumstances naturally prevail, but all reflect the breakdown of British civil, military and mercantile occupation in alien lands, however much the British might delude themselves into believing that their presence is necessary, beneficial or welcome.

The first book in the series deals with the Troubles (1970) or the Irish War of Independence in Ireland, and in it there’s none of the violence that is evident either in the poetry of Yeats, or in popular thrillers, or just in the two words, Sinn Fein. Yes, there are clashes, but the old dears who live in the crumbly old hotel that is the heart and soul of the British Empire in Ireland, hear nothing of them, or choose not to hear. Major Archer, a middle-aged young man is recovering from the effects of shell-shock suffered in the trenches in France during World War 1. He finds his fiancée permanently unable to see him in the old hotel owned and managed by her father, an aggressive and eccentric old Tory, unable to see the leaks in the ceiling, the cats in the rooms, the cracks in the walls…all of which is unexpectedly funny, at the same time so tragic. While Farrell keeps the horror factor more or less as a backdrop for the uninterested, uncaring residents of the hotel, the final scene on the shore is a grim reminder of the reality of the situation in Ireland in the first decade of the twentieth century.

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‘The Siege of Krishnapur,’ is the second volume of the trilogy, and was published in 1973, with an entirely different timeline and background. It is the reenactment of the Siege of Lucknow in the fictional kingdom of Krishnapur during what has been called the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857. However, in 1857, India was still under the control of the East India Company, and therefore technically the mutiny was not against the British Government. However the novel does bring to life the effete and at times very funny trials of the sahibs and memsahibs forced to take care of their own hair, their own clothes, and their own babies as the reality of the siege comes home to them.

More than anything, the English are forced to take stock of their helplessness against the entire population of an enormous land; relief in terms of food and ammunition for the cantonment or fort area, as well as for their allies among the local population, until a relief force from a nearby station such as those stationed at Burma or Malaya was able to arrive, given the adverse weather conditions of the pre-monsoon season, of the hostile nature of the territory in which they were forced to travel.

As a historical perspective, this novel is one the best impressions of the British dilemma in India ever written. In the trilogy, however, it stands out as the sole non-contemporaneous novel of the three.

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Whether ‘The Singapore Grip’ or ‘Troubles’ is wickeder, I am still not able to decide, but both have a sly and mischievous humour beneath the surface panic and horror of the Irish militants or the Japanese army entering Singapore, and effecting a bicycling capture and surrender of the island nation. There may still be readers for whom that February day of 1942 remains a devastating memory; and for them, Farrell's novel will certainly have little humour or satire. The horror of the air attacks against which Singapore had no defence, the internal quarrels between armed forces and the civil administration, the plight of stateless persons and Eurasians, neither Chinese nor Malay nor European, the English expat business community who could not but think of the plunge their profits would suffer as a result of this attack. They moan about the inability of the army and airforce and navy and the Governor and his minions to protect their interests, even as the Japanese land on their shores with amphibian boats…

I was delighted to find Major Archer here as well, in his amiable incompetent way, organising the civil defence of Singapore by trying to find a home for a brothelful of prostitutes.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three novels about the decline of the British Empire as see in Ireland, India and Singapore.
While I found The Troubles quite uninvolving, The Siege of Krishnapur was livelier and The Singapore Grip is epic in scale and quite engrossing

[Asad P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A revealing look into the coloniser's mindset of cultural superiority, greed and hubris.

[Stephen Hanchey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Began to lose interest in the ruin of an Irish hotel. Did not like the characters at all. Then I lost my place in my e-reader and did not return to it at all. Was interested in The Siege and the The Singpore Grip, so I may try to find my way back to those.

[Robert Weiss, · Rating 5 out of 5]

outstanding!!

A huge and powerful success for this author, who has reconstructed these places from his own experience. The characters are so detailed you feel like you know them. Well worth the time to savor.

[Long Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Metaphors and analogies for the British empire's slow downfall. Good read. Will eventually read his other 2 empire books.