Fiction
An unfinished life
A .N. Wilson
The Hill Station: An Unfinished Novel J.G. Farrell (Weidenfeld pp, 228, £6.50)
J.G. Farrell was only 45 when he died so sadly and suddenly, two years ago. The testimony of his friends, appended to the present fragment, confirms that he was a gentle and delightful companion; and his published oeuvre shows him to have been one of the outstanding novelists of his,generation. Indeed there were not many decent novelists who made their debut in the Sixties. But Farrell would have stood up well in any decade and he was too good to lose.
George Bernard Shaw had a brutal theory that some men and women die before their bodies. Decent actors and musicians start performing like zombies weeks months even before their actual demise, so that you are not surprised when you learn that their limbs have finally caught up with the rigor mortis in their artistic faculties. Sad to say, some memory of this cruel idea came to mind as I read Farrell's unfinished novel, The Hill Station. It is not merely unfinished. As a piece of historical fiction, it is a non-starter.
Yet, as a tale, it starts so promisingly: with a splendidly well-evoked train-journey to Kalka the Victorian passengers continuing up into the hills as far as Simla in pony-carts. These characters are Doctor McNab (a character from The Siege of Krishnapur), his wife and niece, and they travel in the same carriage as a lugubrious clergyman coughing blood over his copy of The Christian Year. The padre is called 'the Reverend Kingston' and this is the first jarring note. Clergymen are not called the Reverend Kingston (or, like another character, 'the Reverend Forsythe') particularly not in conversation. Kingston would no more have said 'the Reverend Forsythe and myself' than we, on meeting the Mayor of Oxford or the Archbishop of Westminster would say we had met Worshipful Woodward and Eminence Hume. This is a solecism repeated by Farrell. In Troubles we meet the Reverend Daly; in The Siege of Krishnapur, the Reverend Hampton. But in those two excellent novels it hardly matters: clergymen are on the periphery of the stories and they are, besides, such good novels that the occasional infelicity gets lost in the rich tapestry of detail. But The Hill Station as it stands, is primarily about clergymen; yet Farrell writes as if he knew nothing about them.
He had spent (it stems) years, reading up about the 19th century in the reading room of the British Museum. Much of this research shows itself in The Siege of Krishnapur. It enriches and advances the story. Here, in The Hill Station, it is merely accumulated uncomprehendingly. At the end of The Siege of Krishnapur, Farrell acknowledged his debt to Dr Owen Chadwick's The Victorian Church. What he has done in The Hill Station is to transfer the ritualist controversy (particularly that between Archbishop Tait and the London clergy during the 1870s) to Simla. A bold translation!
It is possible that there were ritualist troubles in India as in other parts of the Empire. Farrell would have known. But the figure of Mr Kingston, -the persecuted ritualist, never once seems life-like. If, as a perceptive essay on Farrell by John Spurting suggests, this shadowy, ascetic figure, a sort of consumptive religious maniac, is meant to be based on Father MacKonochie, then he is laughably unlike. MacKonochie was much odder more arrogant, but more humorous; mysteriously tragic and dying (like Farrell himself) suddenly and in a remote Celtic place. One has only to compare the blunderingly careful pages of The Hill Station with novels like Shane Leslie's The Anglo-Catholic or Compton MacKenzie's Altar Steps to see how lamentably far Farrell was from plumbing the mystery of what made ritualists 'tick'.
Yet, as if half-recognising this fact, he has developed McNab from the rather quarrelsome stereotype of a Scotch doctor which he was in The Siege of Krishnapur into an inquiring mind failing hopelessly to understand the vagaries not only of Anglicanism but of Hinduism (and had the novel been finished, of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists). 'He considered himself to be in the position of a man at a concert who is tone-deaf'.
This is the J.G. Farrell man in essence. It is Sands in The Lung; it is Boris in A Girl in the Head. They are men at a concert who are tone-deaf. So, too, is that sad, brokenhearted Major in Troubles. He is, I think, Farrell's finest creation. He stays in Ireland for the simple and irrational reason that he has fallen in love with a quick-tetnpered cripple; but he has no more sympathy with the brutality of the Sinn Feiners and the Black and Tans than a tone-deaf man at a concert. His only inept act of violence is to mistake the sound of an orchestra tuning up for theavailing of cats, which inspires him to gun down the entire feline population of the Majestic Hotel for fear that they will disrupt the ball.
But there is another tone-deaf man at the concert and that was Farrell himself grappling with the past. Much as I admire his novels I think they will be seen to throw more light on the Harold Years than they do on the history of the Empire. 'The original and motive violence comes from us British who have been violently repressing them ]the Irish] since Cromwell .. .' says the Major in Troubles, voicing a concept which (I would guess) was anachronistic, but which is certainly out of character. Farrell the artist was acutely conscious of what a handicap it was, as an historian, to have a progressive, leftist conscience. 'We look on past ages with condescension', the Collector says in The Siege of Krishnapur, 'as a mere preparation for us . . . but what if we're only an after-glow of them?' This is the salutary thought which he always keeps before him.
Try as he did, he failed. The Siege of Krishnapur does condescend, grossly, to Indians and to Victorians with their funny old beliefs in phrenology, God and selfdiscipline. But it remains a compelling and exciting book. The Hill Station does not merely condescend to the past. It is a gross travesty and the publishers have done Farrell's memory an uncertain kindness in allowing it to be generally read in its unfinished state. But what is worth reading, and published here as an appendix, is his Indian diary, written during 1971 while he was doing research for his novels and full of the strange combination of satire and wistful good-heartedness which is the hall-mark of J.G. Farrell's best writing. ,
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