6 - Critical Legacy

Summary

‘It is evident that The Singapore Grip relates naturally by theme and method to Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur and that taken together these three novels form a major contribution to recent English fiction, and an important addition to the literature of imperialism.’ So wrote Bernard Bergonzi in 1979, in the final paragraph of the second edition of The Situation of the Navel. These words, written while Farrell was alive, are both accurate and misleading, and point to some of the problems that have arisen when critics have approached Farrell's work, especially in the decade immediately after his untimely death. On the one hand, Farrell's prominent place in Bergonzi's chapter ‘Fictions of Histor’ rightly positions Farrell as a significant novelist deserving of attention and praise. Yet Bergonzi's view was by no means widespread and in many ways is exceptional to, rather than typical of, recent accounts of postwar fiction. As John Banville has pointed out, ‘[Farrell's] death at forty-four, a tragically early age, led to an inexplicable decline in his reputation’. The consequences are notable: Farrell's work is given only cursory attention in Malcolm Bradbur's The Modern British Novel (1993), Steven Connor's The English Novel in History 1950-1995 (1995), D. J. Taylor's After the War (1993), and Patricia Waugh's Harvest of the Sixties (1995). As we shall see very briefly, it is indeed possible to explain the decline in Farrell's critical fortunes which, happily, have today well and truly revived.

One important reason concerns the fact that Farrell's mature work engaged with Empire and the consciousness of (mostly) British colonials. At first several critics struggled to understand the particular kind of representation of Empire which Farrell attempted. Bergonzi's phrase ‘the literature of imperialism’ lacks precision as a description of the Empire Trilogy and points to the ways in which some hâve failed to comprehend Farrell's writing. In much criticism of the 1980s Farrell found himself increasingly linked to a tradition of writing about Empire which was waning: he was seen very much as a writer who not only wrote about endings - of colonialism, authority, power - but was also at the end of a well-worn literary practice that (happily, for some) was in its closing stages.