Farrell manages to express the excitement and fear at the same time as he relays the strategies of the defense, making it informative as well as entertaining. On that level, this book is a rather thrilling adventure novel at times. But an attack does come, and the residents are forced to live under siege for months, watching their friends die around them. Chapatis, even if undesired, are hardly cause for alarm. With the ominous arrival of several batches of chapatis, one of the main characters, the Collector, begins gearing up for trouble from “the Muslims.” At first, his fellows think he is just being a silly old man, a bit cracked after so many years. In fact, I wish that Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (which I reviewed here) had been written in a similar style: the language is meticulous, poetic yet simple, and does an excellent job setting the historic atmosphere with a sense of formality without being stifling. But Farrell has a good story-telling style, and it never seemed to me that he felt constrained by diaries when writing his prose. In his afterword, Farrell claims to have gotten a lot of his material from actual accounts, even “in some cases with the words of the witnesses only slightly modified.” So its roots really are, in a way, academic. The novel is, as the title says, about a siege that happened at Krishnapur in 1857.
Still, I feel very smart when I read a book like this on the subway. I enjoy academic historical pieces, but not for the same reasons I enjoy a good novel. It came in NYRB Classics edition, which while stylish gave the book the feel of an academic historical piece. Of the Best of the Booker shortlist, The Siege of Krishnapur was the most pleasant surprise.
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