"To return to the past, through fact or fiction, is to decentre ourselves from history: we are the after-glow; they are the fire."
Bravo Simon!
" in search of an understanding of the past as the living and burning heart of its very own moment."
This reminds me of something Mantel said about the trilogy too. That as she wrote it, none of the characters know that what will unfold will be 'history', dwelt upon for centuries and centuries and perhaps ever more. It was just what happened, they didn't know what was around the corner. No knowingness in the writing, the story or characters.
I find the quote from the Padre to Fleury to be very haunting. It can be read in so many ways. The more I think of it, the more it resonates. Is it a statement of humility, that however exceptional we may feel, we owe everything to the greatness of our past? Is it a pessimistic darkness, that we are doomed to failure and decline? is it a precursor to those who kick against the dying embers and re-light the fire of nationalism or empire which could itself be a warning? What a brilliant piece of writing.
The Collector (I am starting to like him very much, he's holding it all together) walking on the lawn, where they used to have their Garden Parties - such a very British thing- and it's become such a dangerous place, ruined, full of debris. On the other hand the Indians are now the ones, who are holding the parties, in their own way and style. The roles changed. And watching the Siege like some kind of entertainment show.
Thank you, as always, for these thought-provoking and informative essays, Simon! I was particularly struck by your section on smell. We’re all just animals, and much as we might try to hide it from ourselves, our bodies’ natural smells bring us back down to our earthly reality pretty quickly when there are no servants and sanitary supplies around!
Jonathan Swift knew this fact well, which is why I love his satirical poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” so much. The poem is not ridiculing Celia for her normal physical functions, but instead Strephon, who is shocked that “Celia, Celia, Celia s—ts!”
The other literary connection I thought of was Antigone, during the scene when the Padre, the Collector, and the other men are arguing over which of the three indistinguishable corpses is the Catholic one (they are actually fighting over whether the smallest corpse—which will be easier to bury—is Team Protestant or Team Catholic).
In Antigone, the whole conflict is that both Polynices and Eteocles are dead, but Creon gives only Eteocles—whom he views as a hero—a proper burial, leaving the body of the alleged traitor Polynices to rot. Antigone insists on burying Polynices too, and Creon executes her. The problem is, both bodies were so damaged that no one even knew which was which. So all the arguments about honor and betrayal are moot. The two bodies were just that—bodies—indistinguishable, just as we, whether Catholic, or Protestant, or Indian, or British, are all just people in our ordinary, flawed, human bodies.
Great notes, Mari. This theme comes up in Wolf Crawl when we read Bring Up The Bodies: commoners and nobles beheaded at the same execution and now no one can tell them apart. So how do you give the nobles their proper burial?
Throughout this section, there is a sense of the Collector's disintegration, his certainties flaking away under the conditions of the siege. It is subtly done.
I'm amazed that no one has created a film of this--it is so easy to picture it as I read. My mind switches between the almost comical and the most serious ways of looking at the situation--the Collector wandering around the scene, the confusion over the bodies, the gravediggers in theological discussions. I keep thinking about how you would cast the characters.
When the scene sweeps out to the vast plain of India or the space of the heavens, to a vastness beyond the besieged location, there is such a definite shift of feeling.
I finished the book a week ago but reading your notes brings back the emotion I felt then. A mark of how wonderful this book is I think that though nearly all the characters (well, the men, who are the major characters) were ridiculous bumptious figures acting in the service of a racist colonialism, yet I felt deeply about them in some mysterious way and perhaps that is about people being caught in the web of their own current history - just as we all are caught in this strange historical moment we're living in. [Who has not wondered what the world will look like in 50 or 100 years time?]
The Booker website has an article about this book which says it could not be written today or definitely would not win the Booker today because of the almost total absence of Indian characters, a point which lodged in my mind as very thought provoking. I'm not at all mentioning that in a 'political correctness' way but I think this novel does make a very strong anti-colonialism mark, though yes, its gaze is almost entirely on the British. [By the way, the Booker article is excellent I think.]
It's a great article. Interestingly, the book that The Siege of Krishnapur reminds me of is The Promise by Damon Galgut. It also won the Booker, but much more recently. It also focuses on the colonisers, in that case White South Africans, to the almost entire exclusion of Black voices. The effect is put their racism under the microscope. Galgut addresses the readers as a White South African talking to White South Africans. Even though I am not South African, I feel somehow implicated in the reading of it. It is quite powerful.
So I think Farrell does something similar. We are besieged and there is no outside that we can reach... we cannot enter the world of the Indians because it is beyond our comprehension as the colonisers we have become in the action of reading. There is a quote to this effect next week.
So perhaps this kind of book could be written today, and has, and has won the Booker! But still, I think Galgut pulls off the trick better than Farrell.
Very interesting comparison Simon. I read and very much liked The Promise. I recall reading critiques of it for not having much from the Black point of view but those didn't gel for me. Just as you say, I thought it put the whites' racism under the microscope, which is the authentic position Galgut writes from (and lives, actually!) I didn't see any Black-written reviews of that, I might take a look.
I think the pre-siege scene where Fleury walks around with Hari was fascinating because they are so clearly depicted as inhabiting separate mental universes. Fleury has very little clue what Hari means by anything he says or does, but as a reader the discomfort and discordance was very strong. Which was Farrell showing how thick the white man was, I think.
There's going to be a few familiar faces in APOGS I think, from our other reads. I think perhaps the French Revolution is one of the centres of the storm around which all history moves.
Wow brilliant stuff on history’s afterglow and the bit on smells, Simon! My favourite parts of this week’s chapters were the grave-digging, nocturnal scenes. The characters were like Yorick, Vladimir and Estragon all waiting for Godot. Though I suppose in this case they’re all waiting for the relief forces.
Also, I thought that the very end of Part Two — the last paragraph, right after the line on the afterglow, and there’s mention of oil lamp on table, a bedroom materialising out of darkness, furniture, wallpaper — had echoes in all those scenes in Wolf Hall where Cromwell sits in the dark, imagining ghosts.
This is the smelliest book I have read since The Ghost Map, which, incidentally, is about cholera and how John Snow solved the mystery of its transmission. If anything, the smell of putrefaction in the unforgiving heat is even worse here.
The fear of being buried alive was compounded by the arrival of cholera in Paris, by the way, because cholera causes those afflicted by it to look like corpses within hours and become extremely week, to the point that it can be hard to tell if a patient is still alive.
I may be a little ahead, but the way these characters both remain themselves in the situation of the siege and acquire greater insight in who they are is really impressive. I‘m finding myself very interested in all of them.
I have been slow to appreciate this book. I wrote somewhere in my notes that I found it “too hindsighty”, not an elegant word, but it says what I mean (educated as I have been for example by Dame Hilary in Wolf Hall all of whose characters were so brilliantly denied foresight). By contrast, I felt Farrell was too dismissive of the attitudes and assumptions of his characters, at the same time as I, as a nice liberally-minded person, agreed with nearly all of it. It is true that there wasn’t much opposition to imperialism at the time, and that what there was would not pass the simon-pure standards of our day, but I am uncomfortable with laughing at some of these people. Or I was.
Until today’s reading, I have enjoyed TSoK more as an exercise—helped greatly by your notes and links, Simon—than in itself. These recent chapters have somehow grabbed me in a way the others didn’t, which is a good experience, I can report—a reward for hanging on in there! This time, there were those small symbolic things, several of which you have noted too: the poor monkey with its John Company hat, the ghastly birth, the siege as spectacle (by, how very extraordinary, Indians!), which I found much less laboured than elsewhere (though I can’t recall any that failed that test for me, my memory being rubbish). I loved the “Place assiégé, place prise” quote which so succinctly makes its point and illustrates the basic horror of the situation. There were some memorable passages too: the “crimson thought” and the “physical manifestation of his own grieving mind”—the latter at the very end of this week’s selection.
And thank you for the link to the History Today article! I read only the introduction and the section on Lucknow, and am very glad I did. I also enjoyed Buster Keaton on his bike.
I have nothing really to add (and need to find time to read all the tangents) but this is powerful stuff - the smells, the collector’s shaking hand, the priest stuffing a body into a grave. The death in childbirth - amazed (& horrified) they even attempted a C section in those conditions and yet there is humour too. Really glad to be reading this book.
I was just sort of happy to see the Controller finally exiting his place of coping—the library of his mind ( collected facts of science & progress). And also not upset that his shield of superiority is developing a crack or two. I know there is some bit of tenderness in there. Remember how he organized the poetry readings and tried to defend the women against the meany Magistrate?
The only death we are told about today is Mrs Scott’s death in childbirth. But she isn’t one of the three men who are buried that evening. Am I missing something as to why Mrs Scott isn’t buried?
"To return to the past, through fact or fiction, is to decentre ourselves from history: we are the after-glow; they are the fire."
Bravo Simon!
" in search of an understanding of the past as the living and burning heart of its very own moment."
This reminds me of something Mantel said about the trilogy too. That as she wrote it, none of the characters know that what will unfold will be 'history', dwelt upon for centuries and centuries and perhaps ever more. It was just what happened, they didn't know what was around the corner. No knowingness in the writing, the story or characters.
I find the quote from the Padre to Fleury to be very haunting. It can be read in so many ways. The more I think of it, the more it resonates. Is it a statement of humility, that however exceptional we may feel, we owe everything to the greatness of our past? Is it a pessimistic darkness, that we are doomed to failure and decline? is it a precursor to those who kick against the dying embers and re-light the fire of nationalism or empire which could itself be a warning? What a brilliant piece of writing.
The Collector (I am starting to like him very much, he's holding it all together) walking on the lawn, where they used to have their Garden Parties - such a very British thing- and it's become such a dangerous place, ruined, full of debris. On the other hand the Indians are now the ones, who are holding the parties, in their own way and style. The roles changed. And watching the Siege like some kind of entertainment show.
Thank you, as always, for these thought-provoking and informative essays, Simon! I was particularly struck by your section on smell. We’re all just animals, and much as we might try to hide it from ourselves, our bodies’ natural smells bring us back down to our earthly reality pretty quickly when there are no servants and sanitary supplies around!
Jonathan Swift knew this fact well, which is why I love his satirical poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” so much. The poem is not ridiculing Celia for her normal physical functions, but instead Strephon, who is shocked that “Celia, Celia, Celia s—ts!”
The other literary connection I thought of was Antigone, during the scene when the Padre, the Collector, and the other men are arguing over which of the three indistinguishable corpses is the Catholic one (they are actually fighting over whether the smallest corpse—which will be easier to bury—is Team Protestant or Team Catholic).
In Antigone, the whole conflict is that both Polynices and Eteocles are dead, but Creon gives only Eteocles—whom he views as a hero—a proper burial, leaving the body of the alleged traitor Polynices to rot. Antigone insists on burying Polynices too, and Creon executes her. The problem is, both bodies were so damaged that no one even knew which was which. So all the arguments about honor and betrayal are moot. The two bodies were just that—bodies—indistinguishable, just as we, whether Catholic, or Protestant, or Indian, or British, are all just people in our ordinary, flawed, human bodies.
Great notes, Mari. This theme comes up in Wolf Crawl when we read Bring Up The Bodies: commoners and nobles beheaded at the same execution and now no one can tell them apart. So how do you give the nobles their proper burial?
Throughout this section, there is a sense of the Collector's disintegration, his certainties flaking away under the conditions of the siege. It is subtly done.
I'm amazed that no one has created a film of this--it is so easy to picture it as I read. My mind switches between the almost comical and the most serious ways of looking at the situation--the Collector wandering around the scene, the confusion over the bodies, the gravediggers in theological discussions. I keep thinking about how you would cast the characters.
When the scene sweeps out to the vast plain of India or the space of the heavens, to a vastness beyond the besieged location, there is such a definite shift of feeling.
I’m dreaming up my own fan caste as well Judy. I’d love to know what actors come to mind for you!
My problem is I never know the names of the character actors in British TV or films.
I finished the book a week ago but reading your notes brings back the emotion I felt then. A mark of how wonderful this book is I think that though nearly all the characters (well, the men, who are the major characters) were ridiculous bumptious figures acting in the service of a racist colonialism, yet I felt deeply about them in some mysterious way and perhaps that is about people being caught in the web of their own current history - just as we all are caught in this strange historical moment we're living in. [Who has not wondered what the world will look like in 50 or 100 years time?]
The Booker website has an article about this book which says it could not be written today or definitely would not win the Booker today because of the almost total absence of Indian characters, a point which lodged in my mind as very thought provoking. I'm not at all mentioning that in a 'political correctness' way but I think this novel does make a very strong anti-colonialism mark, though yes, its gaze is almost entirely on the British. [By the way, the Booker article is excellent I think.]
It's a great article. Interestingly, the book that The Siege of Krishnapur reminds me of is The Promise by Damon Galgut. It also won the Booker, but much more recently. It also focuses on the colonisers, in that case White South Africans, to the almost entire exclusion of Black voices. The effect is put their racism under the microscope. Galgut addresses the readers as a White South African talking to White South Africans. Even though I am not South African, I feel somehow implicated in the reading of it. It is quite powerful.
So I think Farrell does something similar. We are besieged and there is no outside that we can reach... we cannot enter the world of the Indians because it is beyond our comprehension as the colonisers we have become in the action of reading. There is a quote to this effect next week.
So perhaps this kind of book could be written today, and has, and has won the Booker! But still, I think Galgut pulls off the trick better than Farrell.
Very interesting comparison Simon. I read and very much liked The Promise. I recall reading critiques of it for not having much from the Black point of view but those didn't gel for me. Just as you say, I thought it put the whites' racism under the microscope, which is the authentic position Galgut writes from (and lives, actually!) I didn't see any Black-written reviews of that, I might take a look.
I think the pre-siege scene where Fleury walks around with Hari was fascinating because they are so clearly depicted as inhabiting separate mental universes. Fleury has very little clue what Hari means by anything he says or does, but as a reader the discomfort and discordance was very strong. Which was Farrell showing how thick the white man was, I think.
Thank you Simon, another wonderful post and great background information!
Later in the year we will meet Carnot again, not his writings, but the man himself. In 'A Place of Greater Safety' he is a minor character.
There's going to be a few familiar faces in APOGS I think, from our other reads. I think perhaps the French Revolution is one of the centres of the storm around which all history moves.
We are all living in the afterglow (of the French Revolution) 😂 I love it when our reads have some connections, however small or vague they might be.
Wow brilliant stuff on history’s afterglow and the bit on smells, Simon! My favourite parts of this week’s chapters were the grave-digging, nocturnal scenes. The characters were like Yorick, Vladimir and Estragon all waiting for Godot. Though I suppose in this case they’re all waiting for the relief forces.
Also, I thought that the very end of Part Two — the last paragraph, right after the line on the afterglow, and there’s mention of oil lamp on table, a bedroom materialising out of darkness, furniture, wallpaper — had echoes in all those scenes in Wolf Hall where Cromwell sits in the dark, imagining ghosts.
This is the smelliest book I have read since The Ghost Map, which, incidentally, is about cholera and how John Snow solved the mystery of its transmission. If anything, the smell of putrefaction in the unforgiving heat is even worse here.
The fear of being buried alive was compounded by the arrival of cholera in Paris, by the way, because cholera causes those afflicted by it to look like corpses within hours and become extremely week, to the point that it can be hard to tell if a patient is still alive.
I may be a little ahead, but the way these characters both remain themselves in the situation of the siege and acquire greater insight in who they are is really impressive. I‘m finding myself very interested in all of them.
I have been slow to appreciate this book. I wrote somewhere in my notes that I found it “too hindsighty”, not an elegant word, but it says what I mean (educated as I have been for example by Dame Hilary in Wolf Hall all of whose characters were so brilliantly denied foresight). By contrast, I felt Farrell was too dismissive of the attitudes and assumptions of his characters, at the same time as I, as a nice liberally-minded person, agreed with nearly all of it. It is true that there wasn’t much opposition to imperialism at the time, and that what there was would not pass the simon-pure standards of our day, but I am uncomfortable with laughing at some of these people. Or I was.
Until today’s reading, I have enjoyed TSoK more as an exercise—helped greatly by your notes and links, Simon—than in itself. These recent chapters have somehow grabbed me in a way the others didn’t, which is a good experience, I can report—a reward for hanging on in there! This time, there were those small symbolic things, several of which you have noted too: the poor monkey with its John Company hat, the ghastly birth, the siege as spectacle (by, how very extraordinary, Indians!), which I found much less laboured than elsewhere (though I can’t recall any that failed that test for me, my memory being rubbish). I loved the “Place assiégé, place prise” quote which so succinctly makes its point and illustrates the basic horror of the situation. There were some memorable passages too: the “crimson thought” and the “physical manifestation of his own grieving mind”—the latter at the very end of this week’s selection.
And thank you for the link to the History Today article! I read only the introduction and the section on Lucknow, and am very glad I did. I also enjoyed Buster Keaton on his bike.
Than you Simon! Interesting the whole idea that smell can be racist, I enjoyed the tangent on the politics of smell
I have nothing really to add (and need to find time to read all the tangents) but this is powerful stuff - the smells, the collector’s shaking hand, the priest stuffing a body into a grave. The death in childbirth - amazed (& horrified) they even attempted a C section in those conditions and yet there is humour too. Really glad to be reading this book.
LOVE your tangent in Point 2...
Sorry - fingers were too quick! Thanks for your insight and all the fascinating tangets!
I was just sort of happy to see the Controller finally exiting his place of coping—the library of his mind ( collected facts of science & progress). And also not upset that his shield of superiority is developing a crack or two. I know there is some bit of tenderness in there. Remember how he organized the poetry readings and tried to defend the women against the meany Magistrate?
The only death we are told about today is Mrs Scott’s death in childbirth. But she isn’t one of the three men who are buried that evening. Am I missing something as to why Mrs Scott isn’t buried?
Interesting. Perhaps her body was not ready to be buried? Or they were not ready to bury her?
I kept wondering about that, too!