The final retreat of the British, still doggedly stiff-upper-lipped, through the pantries, laundries, music rooms and ballroom of the residency, using chandeliers and violins as weapons, is a comic delight. By the end of it cholera, starvation and the Sepoys have done for most of the inhabitants, who are reduced to eating beetles and, in the absence of powder and shot, loading their cannons with monogrammed silver cutlery and false teeth. It is left to the Governor of Krishnapur, a sensitive, cultured man with a collection of treasures in his residence, to prepare for the siege. Despite the omens, the young British cavalry officers continue to indulge their taste for galloping into the nearest memsahib's drawing room, jumping over the sofas and then filling their sola topis with champagne instead of water to quench their horses' thirst.
This is the fictitious account, hilarious and horrifying by turns, of a besieged British garrison which held out for four months in the summer of 1857, the year of the Great Indian Mutiny, against a horde of native Sepoys. ( )įarrell is the funniest novelist in English since Evelyn Waugh, with the same eye for the absurd as Tom Sharpe. This is the second book in his Empire Trilogy. Based on historical events, Farrell does an incredible job with the writing and the story-telling. I like how the tension grows in the story to an almost unbearable pitch and the subtle humor, that permeates the first half of the novel slowly begins to crumble.
The colonists start to prepare for an attack but they are soon surrounded and the siege begins.
There are are hints and rumblings that an uprising is about to occur, by Muslim soldiers. The British here are living a comfortable life, clutching to their noble, old-world principles. An isolated British outpost, on the subcontinent. Even Justice, Science, and Respectability.” “All our actions and intentions are futile unless animated by warmth of feeling. “India itself was now a different place the fiction of happy natives being led forward along the road to civilization could no longer be sustained.” All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them.” “The British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving.
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