I for one felt a shudder of new uncertainty.
His comically detailed descriptions of various residents' losses of faith - coupled with their outlandish religious beliefs and the way they adhere to now discredited theories like phrenology - forces us into a hard look at the accepted wisdom of the modern world (say, the immediacy of global warming, or the need to worship Radiohead).
Here's how he describes the decline of the town's leader, the Collector: "From the farmyard in which his certitudes perched like fat chickens, every night of the siege, one or two were carried off in the jaws of rationalism and despair."įarrell said that he wanted to show "yesterday reflected in today's consciousness", but by association, of course, he also holds a glass up to the modern world.
Farrell mercilessly strips his characters of their defences and batters their values with something approaching glee. The stench of putrefaction permeates all the later stages of the book, while horrific observations like those about carrion birds so bloated on corpses they ignore the huge piles of sheep offal festering inside the town are deliberately made to feel mundane, as is the stark fact that everyone is growing visibly thinner by the day.Įqually effective is the exploration of how and why these starched Victorians start to wilt, and where their breaking point lies. The sights and smells of the siege are vividly conjured. Farrell spins off from this to give an account not so much of the military tactics and feats of daring associated with warfare as day-to-day life under siege conditions. The inspiration is a diary kept by Maria Germon, a young woman who had been through the siege of Lucknow. (More commonly know as " the Indian Mutiny", a semantic minefield that gives a measure of the kind of territory Farrell was charging into.) The siege of the fictional town of Krishnapur that Farrell describes was explicitly based on the real experiences of British subjects during the Indian rebellion of 1857.
0 kommentar(er)
