Admittedly they came to me one morning in the half-dozing state that occurs when you are on the cusp of waking up. In the end I was fascinated by the characters and the way the author grew them and altered their views through the trials and deprivations of living through a siege situation.Īnd for the first time in an absolute age, I actually felt like I picked up on some of the themes. Fortunately as I went further through the book and when the siege finally began it all started to flow for me. I felt that the story started off very slowly and I was dreading another reading trial like The Poisonwood Bible.

The central characters are Mr Hopkins, the Collector Fleury, a recent arrival to India and his widowed sister, Miriam the Dunstaple family – father, the local physician – son, a young military man and daughter Louise, the season’s beauty Mr Willoughby, the Magistrate and the Padre. The story is told from the perspective of a number of British residents in Krishnapur. This is the 1973 Booker Prize winner by J.G.Farrell. 'The magnificient passages of action in The Siege of Krishnapur, its gallery of characters, its unashamedly detailed and fascinating dissertations on cholera, gunnery, phrenology, the prodigal inventiveness of its no doubt also well-documented scenes should satisfy the most exacting and voracious reader.Book #343 Reviewer: Ms Oh Waily (first published 2008) But Farrell manages just this here: his imaginative insight and technical virtuosity combine to produce a novel of quite outstanding quality' The Times 'Suspense and subtlety, humour and horror, the near-neighbourliness of heroism and insanity: it is rare to find such divergent elements being controlled in one hand and being raced, as it were, in one yoke.

The Siege of Krishnapur is a modern classic of narrative excitement that also digs deep to explore some fundamental questions of civilisation and life. As food and ammunition grow short, the Residency, its defences battered by shot and shell and eroded by the rains, becomes ever more vulnerable. They prepare to fight for their lives with what weapons they can muster. Then the sepoys at the nearest military cantonment rise in revolt and the British community retreats with shock into the Residency. For the British there, life is orderly and genteel. In the Spring of 1857, with India on the brink of a violent and bloody mutiny, Krishnapur is a remote town on the vast North Indian plain.

The siege of krishnapur review