The Siege of Krishnapur

The Siege of Krisnapur was not the book that I was hoping it would be. I wanted a book about the British in India in which the British ones aren't the good guys; one that actually shows the damage we did and justifies the various uprisings that took place during the years of the Empire.  This book doesn't quite do that, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

J.G. Farrell's book tells the story of the Brits in the fictional Krishnapur leading up to and during the tine of the titular siege.  There's a bunch of fairly stereotypical period drama foder- romances, religion, disagreements about the causes of cholera- that kind of thing.

What I like about the book is thatb even though the characters are all fundamentally quite likeable, Farrell gives the audience enough distance to see why there would be mutinies.  At their core the British characters are all a little ricdiculous.  They are concern by fashion and The Great Exhibition- they constantly reaffirm that they are the more civilised and advanced race but do nothing to back up their claims. 

One of the beat examples of this is the funniest part of the book.  The Catholic Padre is trying to persuade Fluery (a young man finally starting to treat the siege as something more than a great adventure) of the existence of God using William Paley's argument for intelligent design.  He does this whill the pair are being attacked.  The whole thing is a great juxtaposition between the Church stating all life is sacred as it is designed by God and the immediate and actual need to kill to survive.  It is my favourite part of the book by a long way, mostly because it ends with the science that the Brits hild so dear being tamped down in a wonderfully ironic way.

There's quite a lot of good stuff about women running through The Siege of Krishanpur. Fluery's widowed sister Miriam is also caight up in the siege along with his romantic interest Louise Dunstaple, and Fluery has some opinions about how they should be behaving.  He believes, during an early dinner, that Lousie is behaving quite correctly in sitting quietly and not giving her opinion on the topic of 'progress' (what else).  Fluery believes that "a woman's special skill is to listen quietly to what a fellow has to say and thereby create the sort of atmosphere in which good conversation can flourish." Naturally, he approves of Louise. He applies simular standards to Miriam, becoming frustrated when he believes she is flirting with an older, married man.  What saves me from hating Fleury is what I mentioned earlier- Farrell's ability to make characters ridiculous.  Fleury is unable to regulate Miriam's behaviour because she raised him, he only believes himself to be the authority.  He can't even get her to stop calling him by the childhood nickname 'Dobbin.'  Miriam, in contrast to this, fully understands that as a Victorian woman she is expected to bend to the whims of a husband- recently widowed she intends to stay this way rather than obtaining a new man to tell her what to do.

I enjoyed The Siege of Krishanpur more than I thought I would.  It's not an absolute page turner but it's aolid abd it's funny. I still haven't got my bliatering critique of the British colonisation but I'm not really likely to- at least not from a British author, but I liked what I did get. I've been meaning to read sone of Farrell's work for quite aome time and this book has certainly whetted my appetite for the other two of hia that I have waiting for me further down The List.

The Temple of My Familiar

So, it's been an age since I've written a blog post. I have still been chipping away at the 1,001 books but this is marking a new and concerted effort to get back into the habit of writing. The book that I decided to do this with is The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker. I feel, in retrospect, this was a poor choice.

I found the book so hard to get into. It's a mish-mash of multiple characters and their stories, all of which are linked in the loosest of ways, rather than any conventional narrative.  There were times upon finishing one story that I had no desire to keep reading and move on to another character. The stories are too up and down, too loosely linked to make the thing unputdownable or to make me want to go back to it when I wasn't reading it. It's a shame, really, because the bits that are good really are very good.  I am going to do my level best to concentrate on those bits.

Let's start with Fanny.  I like Fanny. She is free spirited and fun and the best character by a country mile.  To be honest, the whole book would have been better if it was just about her.  Fanny, we find out 100 or so pages into the book is the granddaughter of The Color Purple's Celie.  Raised by Celie and Shug from that book she is fantastically outspoken and comfortable defying convention.  She divorces her husband, Suwelo- not because she doesn't love him but because she doesn't want to be a Married Woman any more.  She leaves her academic career teaching Women's Studies because she is sick of explaining her femininity to men and her blackness to white people.  All I can say is that she is one of the few characters who ends up with a real narrative- her story is by far the most interesting.  Fanny feels like a breath of fresh air in the book, I can think of no other way to describe it.

Well, I'm sort of out of the bits of The Temple of My Familiar that I enjoyed and I don't think that I expressed exactly what I enjoyed particularly well.  On to the bits I didn't like. I can probably write more eloquently about them anyway.

One of the characters, Lissie, has had thousands of past lives.  These come out in photographs- she is never the same person twice on film.  Lissie's story is essentially just that of the lives she has led and while some of them are good and interesting none are more so than the life she is currently living.  Her past lives seem like a distraction from who she is rather than a part of it.  She is the trope of 'wise old woman' and she plays it easily enough that Walker's reliance on the supernatural feels like a cheap and unnecessary trick that I am not convinced works. Yes, part of Lissie's character is how her husband Hal and multiple men over the years have accepted and been fascinated with her past but these moments just made me wonder why Lissie on her own wasn't enough.  I would have preferred Lissie with one life: not trimmed down but distilled- with superfluous stories about the time she was a lion.

There were a few parts in the book when it seemed like the characters were only acting to shock.  Lissie has past lives, Arveyda has an affair with his wife's mother, said wife ends up sleeping with Suwelo.  There are great moments in the book but they are few and far between. This is a sort of sequel to a book that I have a great affection for- one that I studied for my A-Levels.  I care about Celie and Shug too much to really enjoy a book that doesn't use their potential and instead relegates them to the sidelines as dotty old ladies.

Next time it's JG Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur... hopefully with less of a hiatus.