It was the biggest air-sea rescue in peacetime, and an enthralled world watched, astonished, as helicopters and naval vessels braved murderous, moving mountain ranges of sea which had swallowed or maimed scores of sailing vessels. Through the day and the night that followed, dozens and dozens of bedraggled, exhausted survivors were plucked from the maddened ocean and were brought ashore, some so weakened by exposure that they would expire anyway in the warmth of their hospital beds.
That was the spectacle which seized the public imagination in the middle of August, 20 years ago, as the Fastnet race sailed into the maw of a hurricane. Virtually nobody noticed a more private and simultaneous cameo in a little bay in West Cork: of a delicate, somewhat distrait, gentleman of middle age being swept into the turbulent waters off Kilcrohane; of his struggling while the seas churned and lashed; of his weak attempts to regain the rock from which he had fallen; and of the brine filling his lungs and discreetly claiming his life even as beyond the shoreline it was spectacularly claiming a dozen and half other lives. Thus died J. G. Farrell; Jim to his friends.
Unfulfilled talent
The death of artists when their talent is yet unfulfilled is a deeply tormenting business; but sometimes that which transformed a person into an artist is simply reclaiming its own creation. Who does not deplore the death of Wilfred Owen at war's end, only days before he would have been freed from the tyrannies of the trenches to explore and develop his remarkable talent in peace? But it was upon the anvil of war that he shaped the tools of his poetry: once robbed of that anvil, how might he have fared?
J. G. Farrell similarly. To be sure, it was not a storm which turned him into a great writer, nor even the wild Atlantic. But what made him helpless in the wash and the wave of the West Cork seas 20 years ago next month was his useless arm, crippled by polio when he was a young man. By his own account, up until then, he was pretty much a rugger-bugger, hearty, jolly, pinting with the chaps. Polio ended that, caused him to ponder and to turn to the pen. Polio gave him to us, and after a decade and a half of perfectly splendid writing, polio took him away from us.
He is called Irish, Anglo-Irish, English, according pretty much to the colours on your mast. Does it matter? On the night that he died, did rescuers rescue according to nationality? Yet it does matter, sort of; for his fictional explorations were not refutations of this peculiar thing we call identity, but examinations and dissections of them, delicate, probing, ironical and most of all, wise. Maybe he inhabited that intangible middle kingdom of Goldsmith, Wilde, Shaw, Beckett and even Yeats: and that is indeed an honourable kingdom to be a subject of.
Three great novels
He wrote three very great novels, which stand on their merits no matter the perspective from which you view them; Troubles, a gallantly and (then) unfashionably revisionist look at the Hiberno-British war of 1919-21: The Siege of Krishnapur, a view from an equally unexpected angle of the Indian Mutiny; and The Singapore Grip, again a work of fiction written from a vantage point people few people suspected even existed, never mind observing from.
Troubles is a truly fascinating work, challenging almost all populist preconceptions of virtue and goodness of the period in question, which, by the time it was written, 1968-ish, had become gospel. Myth had transformed the IRA campaign during the War of Independence into a soldierly affair of noble flying columns meeting and slaying the dragon of brutish, uncouth Black and Tans. Jim Farrell repositioned that campaign very definitely in the realm of a fairly dismal reality, of a personal war in which victim generally knew his killer.
Different rules
He did a comparable demythologising with The Siege of Krishnapur, which I read when still in thrall to the heresy that to be anti-colonial must necessarily be good, and that anti-colonialism might fairly be judged by a different set of rules to those governing other behaviour. Jim Farrell found some of the deeds by the mutineers deeply disgusting. With the Vietnam war haunting the white liberal conscience, it was profoundly subversive for a white liberal (even one such as Jim who castigated conditions on the Booker McConnell plantations while accepting a literary prize funded by that company) even to risk discussing atrocities by non-whites.
To celebrate the life of this very great Irish writer - for his Irishness is indisputable - Lavinia Greacen's long awaited biography is being published by Bloomsbury next month, the 20th anniversary of his death. The publishing event of the autumn: order it now from your bookseller. Another celebration occurs at Bantry House at 8 p.m. on July 31st, when Lavinia and others will be discussing Jim Farrell and his works. Open to all comers to celebrate a man who was morally brave and wise and funny; a glorious storyteller who could stitch a tale as perfectly as an Aubusson tapissier, and who caressed the English language as if it were cut from a cloth of gold. Free to all Farrellophiles.