When I was 16 or 17 we read Catch-22 in English class and because I was a 16 or 17 year-old boy — and because it's brilliant — I loved it. My enthusiasm must have been palpable because my teacher gave me a copy of J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, set in a fictional colonial outpost during the Indian Rebellion (or "Mutiny" as she would have said) of 1857, and suggested I do a compare-and-contrast on the two novels. I probably wrote about how a rich vein of black-comic absurdity runs through both of them, and how they're both about people going mad in confined spaces — an army base in one, a colonial cantonment in the other — in the midst of death and indecency. I probably didn't make much of Siege's discussion of the nature of civilisation and the relative worth of faith and reason, words and deeds, and definitely not of its unflinching post-mortem of the (British) colonial project. (Incidentally I think Catch-22 can also be read through a colonial lens). I don't remember being quite as smitten with Siege as with Catch back then, perhaps because it forwent the cartoon anarchy and balls-to-the-wall yank attitude of the latter in favour of a more phlegmatic, British kind of humour. But I did enjoy it, and doing so made me feel grown-up in a way a book hadn't before.

Since then I've read each of Farrell's so-called "Empire trilogy" — of which Siege is the second and shortest — twice, and I'm convinced that his misadventurous death at 44 (slipped on rocks while angling) deprived English lit. of an unknown but non-zero number of masterpieces. I love his controlled raconteurism, his way of as if he were sitting by you telling you his story without any intermediate bookish artifice. This isn't to say that his prose is ordinary or plain, just that it's always a medium, never the message itself. It takes courage, I think, to write this kind of prose, but it brings a detachment to the narrative that's essential for its overarching irony, verging on mordancy, to be effective. Irony is Farrell's principal mode; he delights in all kinds of irony, especially unsubtle ones. and both evolve into siege-type situations, too, but it's here that all the glorious gradual disintegrations of dignity — disease, distress, dirt, famine — that go with being besieged are displayed to their fullest.