J.G. Farrell
IF you’re gripped by the major ITV dramatisation of J.G. Farrell’s tragi-comic tale charting the invasion of Singapore during the Second World War, why not read beyond the lines of the television screenplay and enjoy the book in all its rich detail.
Adapted by Oscar-winning screenwriter and playwright
Christopher Hampton, with executive producer Damien Timmer, and starring Luke
Treadway, David Morrissey, Jane Horrocks and Charles Dance, the Sunday night
drama is gathering a new generation of Farrell fans.
Described by The Spectator as ‘one of the most outstanding
novelists of his generation,’ Farrell was born in Liverpool in 1935 but spent a
good deal of his life abroad, before settling in London where he wrote most of
his novels.
The Singapore Grip, first published in 1978, was the third
book of his outstanding Empire Trilogy which began with Troubles, featuring the
uprisings in Ireland, and the Booker prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur, centred
on British India.
Just a year after the publication of The Singapore Grip,
Farrell bought a farmhouse in Bantry Bay on the Irish coast but was killed when
he was hit by a wave while fishing and was washed out to sea. However, his book
exploring and satirising British colonial society in the run-up to the Japanese
invasion has become a modern classic.
EMPIRE TRILOGY: J.G. Farrell |
Away from this suburban conglomerate of calm and comforts, the
police are discovering that no matter how forcefully they break one strike, the
natives go on strike somewhere else.
And his eldest, rebellious daughter Joan keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, Oxford graduate Matthew Webb, son of Blackett’s partner, who arrives in Singapore from England as war is exploding across Europe, is an idealistic sympathiser with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming – the war in Europe means the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett’s price-fixing and market manipulation – but something is wrong.
No one yet suspects that the world is poised on the edge of
the abyss, the British Empire, with its fixed boundaries between classes and
nations, is about to come to a terrible end and Singapore is set to fall to the
Japanese.
Click HERE for Lancashire Post review
A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city
under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip is a work of immense
imaginative power which captures the heart and soul of both colonial Singapore
and the people who lived there.
Written with Farrell’s trademark wit, energy and observant
eye for the flaws and foibles of Britain’s days of Empire, this is a story that
peers into the many and diverse features of Singapore in the Thirties and
Forties… the stately colonial homes, the cocktail lounges, the opium dens, the
slums, and the seething mass of people rich and poor. A timeless tale that still speaks volumes…
(W&N, paperback, £10.99)
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