J. G. Farrell: Empire Trilogy

Abstract

Mary Renault reminds us of an historian interpreting facts and bringing the past to life for present readers on the basis of the evidence. Burgess and Nye put us in mind of literary critics for whom facts about the past are seen in relation to the literature, language and legends which have survived. J. G. Farrell resembles a philosopher for whom facts are curious in themselves. Margaret Drabble’s essay on his work comments on the abundance of ideas which obsess the characters and of things which beset them.¹ It is the most pervasive characteristic of these novels. Facts for Farrell are made of ideas and of things; he holds up these specimens of the past for inspection, with a kind of wonderment. Objects give reality to facts. A hotel is in charred ruins today because it was burned down in the Troubles of 1921. There are funeral-wells at Lucknow because of the Mutiny. Ideas helped to make the facts, and offered explanation at the time. Farrell has ideas of his own, although he is not doctrinaire. His ruling idea is that man is caught between the irresistible temptations of thought and the recalcitrant nature of the physical world about him. He set his best novels at three points in the hundred years before he began to write and he argued that this distancing gave a freedom to his vision of life. Life, he thought, ‘basically does not change very much’.