The Siege of Krishnapur

In 1857, in the fictional Indian station of Krishnapur, the Collector has been unsettled by chapatis appearing mysteriously on his desk and has begun, to general amusement, to fortify the Residency. When the sepoys rise, the British community retreats behind his earthworks, and the siege that follows lasts four months. The Collector is a man of the Great Exhibition, a believer in progress, science and the civilising power of manufactures, and Farrell takes an exquisite pleasure in dismantling that faith item by item: the electroplated dish covers used as helmets, the marble busts of great poets fired from cannon, Shakespeare's head proving the most lethal projectile of all. Two doctors conduct a public feud over the causes of cholera while the patients die. The magnificent Victorian furniture goes into the ramparts. Farrell researched the historical sieges exhaustively and reproduces the physical facts of starvation, dysentery and flies with clinical care, and his comedy is savage rather than gentle: a novel that finds imperial self-belief absurd without ever suggesting the suffering was.