J.G Farrell : The Making of a Writer - Hardcover

Greacen, Lavinia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747544638 ISBN 13: 9780747544630

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1999

Synopsis

In 1979, in a remote corner of West Cork in Ireland, J.G. Farrell was drowned while fishing from the rocks near his home. He was 43, and it had only been six years since he had won the Booker Prize for his novel "The Siege of Krishnapur". A man who elevated privacy to a high art, Farrell's leagcy would be the "Empire Trilogy", now hailed as a classic of the 20th century, as well as a lingering mystery. After the drowning, newspaper reports at once gave rise to rumours about how and why he died. Farrell had always been a man who baffled even those closest to him. Based on her access to J.G. Farrell's family and friends, as well as his notebooks and personal correspondence, Lavinia Greacen's biography disentangles not only the full circumstances of the novelist's death, but the story of his life and how it informed everything he wrote. Born into a family with contrasting Irish, English and expatriot traditions, Farrell eventually found himself drawn to write about the aftermath of empire in Ireland, India and Singapore. After a conventional education, the outstanding athlete was stricken with polio in his first term at Oxford. The ordeal affected him for life and lent his writing a surreal humour and an instinctive sympathy with people under extreme pressure. Farrell was an enigmatic, elusive character who nevertheless amused and captivated a wide circle of friends in England and America. He never married, but loved many women, whose traces can be found in his fiction.

About this title

Product Description

J.G. Farrell The Making of a Writer

Review

His gravestone, in a remote churchyard in the west of Ireland, reads simply: J.G.Farrell, novelist, 1935-1979. In recent years he has been in danger of being forgotten. But biographer Lavinia Greacen (author of the hugely acclaimed Chink, a biography of Hemingway's real-life military hero), has done a splendid job in rediscovering this most elusive of writers. After a childhood in the Far East, Farrell returned to his native Ireland and then went on to Oxford where he contracted severe polio which left a previously athletic man weakened for life--but perhaps this was also the "wound" that made him a writer. He never married but had numerous affairs, and Greacen ably traces the bewildering number of women in his life with great clarity. Farrell won the Booker Prize in 1973 for The Siege of Krishnapur, and was establishing himself as one of the most significant novelists of his time, when he died in a tragic fishing accident in Bantry Bay in 1979. The same violent summer storm would, 24 hours later, be responsible for 18 deaths in the Fastnet Race. This is a fascinating biography of a unjustly neglected novelist and will surely serve as a powerful reminder of Farrell's great and memorable talent. -- Christopher Hart

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0747544638
• ISBN 13: 9780747544630
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264