1 - Introduction: ‘fanciful tales’

Summary

‘One day we shall vanish. But for the moment how lovely we are!’

(T 329)

On 15 June 1978, a letter appeared in the New York Review of Books which called upon the Kenyan Government to release the distinguished writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who had been imprisoned under Kenya's Public Security Act following the publication of his novel Petals of Blood (1978). Its signatories included several major figures from the world of literature: James Baldwin, Margaret Drabble, Edna O'Brien, Harold Pinter, Philip Roth, and the novelist J. G. Farrell. Farrell's presence in this list reveals not only his often passionate engagement with affairs, both past and present, in countries with a history of British colonialism, but also that his reputation and status as a writer of significance had been firmly established by the late 1970s. He had worked hard and had overcome many challenges in securing his career and renown as a novelist. Pike Ngugi he took his vocation very seriously as a writer unafraid to challenge authority, prejudice and exploitation. By the latter part of the decade Farrell's novels had established him as a major figure in contemporary literature. A busy and productive future, surely, lay in wait for him.

Farrell's three novels of the 1960s had attracted modest attention, but it was his writing of the 1970s which transformed his life and career. Troubles (1970) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, while The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction. He became a reviewer for leading publications such as the Spectator, Listener, New Stateman and the Times Literary Supplement, and in June 1978 was just about to publish his longest and most ambitious novel, The Singapore Grip (1978), which, with the two preceding novels, formed the ‘Empire Trilogy’, for which he is best remembered.

The Trilogy may be thought of as a loose confederation of works, linked not by a common plot or cast of characters (although the figure of the Major from Troubles appears again in The Singapore Grip) but rather by a shared set of historical, political and literary concerns. Farrell described it as a triptych ‘with each panel presenting a picture of the Empire at a different historical watershed and by their association shedding, I hope, some light on each other’, but the term ‘Trilog’ has stuck.