![]() ![]() ![]() He went on to read everything he could lay his hands on about the Mutiny, and in writing the novel he cannibalized diaries, letters and memoirs written by those who experienced it, sometimes using their actual words. Farrell had found his novel’s cornerstone. It was written by Maria Germon, the wife of an East India Company officer, and it recorded how those who had taken security and privilege for granted coped with acute danger, overcrowding, filth, disease and death. ![]() His epiphany came when in the British Museum he came across a journal of the five-month siege of Lucknow. Once again Farrell had difficulty in finding a satisfactory starting-point for his intentions. In The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), that role is taken by a British Residency under attack during the Indian Mutiny. ![]() In Troubles, the doomed Majestic Hotel stands as a symbol of power crumbling under the onslaught of inevitable forces of change. But even while writing that book, Farrell had been researching its successor in which he wanted to expand on the theme of capturing people ‘undergoing history’. In Issue 49, we left Jim Farrell the winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his novel Troubles, set in the Irish War of Independence and the first in his trilogy dealing with the decline of British imperial power. ![]()
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