Part satire, part adventure story, The Siege tells the tale of the residents of Krishnapur, a fictional British colonial town in the year of the Indian Mutiny. Farrell’s novel does not seek to extol the opinions of those it portrays, but display and critique them, and it does so in a very clever way. When a 2005 Sunday Times Review of Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur suggested that ‘A novel set in India in 1857, the year of the Mutiny, in which the points of view of the Indians are almost non-existent, would be unlikely to win the Man Booker Prize these days’, I feel it missed the author’s point entirely. 'The magnificient passages of action in The Siege of Krishnapur, its gallery of characters, its unashamedly detailed and fascinating dissertations on cholera, gunnery, phrenology, the prodigal inventiveness of its no doubt also well-documented scenes should satisfy the most exacting and voracious reader.George Weidenfeld and Nicholson Ltd, 1973 For a novel to be witty is one thing, to tell a good story is another, to be serious is yet another, but to be all three is surely enough to make it a masterpiece' John Spurling, New Statesman 'The magnificient passages of action in The Siege of Krishnapur, its gallery of characters, its unashamedly detailed and fascinating dissertations on cholera, gunnery, phrenology, the prodigal inventiveness of its no doubt also well-documented scenes should satisfy the most exacting and voracious reader. But Farrell manages just this here: his imaginative insight and technical virtuosity combine to produce a novel of quite outstanding quality' The Times 'Suspense and subtlety, humour and horror, the near-neighbourliness of heroism and insanity: it is rare to find such divergent elements being controlled in one hand and being raced, as it were, in one yoke. The Siege of Krishnapur is a modern classic of narrative excitement that also digs deep to explore some fundamental questions of civilisation and life. As food and ammunition grow short, the Residency, its defences battered by shot and shell and eroded by the rains, becomes ever more vulnerable.

They prepare to fight for their lives with what weapons they can muster. Then the sepoys at the nearest military cantonment rise in revolt and the British community retreats with shock into the Residency. For the British there, life is orderly and genteel. In the Spring of 1857, with India on the brink of a violent and bloody mutiny, Krishnapur is a remote town on the vast North Indian plain.

The siege of krishnapur review