J. G. Farrell(1935–1979)

James Gordon Farrell was born at 15 Greenmount Road, Wallasey on Merseyside on 25 January 1935, second son of William Farrell, a Anglo-Irish accountant of County Galway descent who was working for the Liverpool branch of Shell-Mex, and Josephine Russell. The family was Anglo-Irish Protestant of small means: the father had moved from Roscommon to Liverpool in 1927 on the Shell-Mex transfer, the mother was from a Manchester-Irish Catholic family, and the household kept both Liverpool-English and west-Irish identities through the boys' childhood. The family moved back to Dublin in 1936 when the Shell-Mex Liverpool office was reorganised; he was schooled briefly at the Dublin parish school at Killiney, then in 1945 at ten was sent to the English Catholic preparatory school at Castlepark Bromsgrove, and from thirteen at the Rossall School near Fleetwood in Lancashire, where he stayed until 1953.

He went up to Brasenose College, Oxford in 1956 at twenty-one to read modern languages on a St Mary's Hall college scholarship. The polio came at twenty in the autumn term of 1956. He had been playing rugby for the Brasenose second fifteen on a Wednesday-afternoon match against a Cambridge college side at the Christ Church Meadow, came off the field with severe headache and muscle pain, was admitted to the Radcliffe Infirmary the same evening, and was diagnosed with paralytic poliomyelitis within forty-eight hours. The post-polio sequelae left him with a permanent muscular wasting of the upper arms and shoulders that ran across the next twenty-three years of his life. He took the bachelor's degree in 1960 at twenty-five (the polio recovery had taken the additional academic year), and at twenty-six in 1961 moved to Paris on a French-language scholarship and began the novelist's career on a bedroom and typewriter and a teaching-English-as-a-foreign-language sideline.

The first two novels (*A Man from Elsewhere*, 1963, and *The Lung*, 1965) were small Hemingway-and-Camus exercises that he later disowned as juvenilia; the third (*A Girl in the Head*, 1967) was a Anglo-Irish small-town novel of the Paris years. The career turned in 1968 on the Harkness Foundation Fellowship to the United States, which gave him a year's residence at New Haven, Connecticut and the opportunity to write the first of what became the Empire trilogy. *Troubles* (1970), the post-1916 Anglo-Irish-Big-House novel set at the fictional Majestic Hotel on the County Wexford coast across the 1919 to 1921 Anglo-Irish War, was the first of the three Empire novels and was the foundation of his reputation. *Troubles* won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1971, was retrospectively awarded the Lost Booker Prize in 2010 (the Booker prize that would have been awarded for the 1970 calendar year but was missed in the post-1970 rule-change reorganisation of the prize), and is now generally regarded as the best of the three.

*The Siege of Krishnapur* (1973), the fictional account of the Indian Mutiny siege of a fictional small north-Indian station based on the Lucknow and Cawnpore precedents, won the Booker Prize in 1973. *The Singapore Grip* (1978), the Singapore-Fall-of-1942 novel that took the third position in the Empire trilogy, was the final completed novel. He had begun working on a fourth novel (the unfinished *The Hill Station*, set in the senior post-1857 Indian-civil-service-and-evangelical-missionary world of the Himalayan hill stations of the late nineteenth century) in 1977 on the move from London to a isolated coastal house at Bantry on the south-west coast of County Cork. The fourth novel was incomplete at his death and was published in 1981 as the unfinished manuscript-and-notebook compilation.

He died at the Bantry house on 11 August 1979. He had taken his fishing rod out on the rocks at the bay below the cottage on an evening when the Atlantic weather had been forecast as a approaching gale; he was on the rocks at the lower-tide level when the storm came up faster than the forecast had indicated; a unusual wave took him into the water at the tide-edge. The polio-weakened upper-arm musculature prevented him from pulling himself back onto the rocks. He drowned. The small Bantry fishing-village neighbour Pauline Foley recovered the fishing rod from the rocks at low tide the following morning; the body was washed up on the beach at Skull a fortnight later. He was forty-four years old. He is buried at the Roman Catholic cemetery at Skull. The post-1979 reputation has been continuously rising; the three completed Empire novels are, by the modern senior critical consensus, among the most significant English-language fiction of the second half of the twentieth century. The Farrell name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic *Ó Fearghail* (descendant of Fearghal, the brave or valorous one), the foundational Longford and Roscommon surname of the medieval Irish midlands; he carried it from a Wallasey Shell-Mex accountant's household into the post-imperial English-language novel of the slow British decline.