The Singapore Grip (New York Review Books Classics)

In 1979 a freak wave swept the Booker Prize-winning writer J. G. Farrell out to sea; his body was found a month later. In his brief life he'd written what would be, along with Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet, the most complex and ambitious series of historical novels to emerge from Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. The novels of the Empire Trilogy were set during three different assaults on British rule: Troubles during the IRA's brutal guerrilla war in 1919-1921; The Siege of Krishnapur during the Indian Mutiny of 1857; and this novel (long out of print and just reissued) in the years leading up to and during the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore. In all three tales of violence and calamity Farrell juxtaposed an Austenean comedy of manners with slapstick and gallows humor, and punctuated the whole with absurdist scenes. The past is famously a foreign country, and in Krishnapur, for which he won the Booker, and The Singapore Grip, Farrell's extraordinarily dense and fascinating detail couples with a subtle rendering of his characters' alien mentalities. Although Krishnapur is his most finely balanced book, The Singapore Grip (the term variously denotes a tropical disease, a rattan suitcase, a secret handshake, a special hairpin, the vaginal contractions that were a specialty of the city's prostitutes, and the British economic hold on Southeast Asia) is his broadest canvas and most elaborate work. Ramifying from an account of the relationship between the two British partners of a Singapore commercial firm, the 572-page novel takes readers on leisurely tours of, for instance, the nightlife of Singapore (then perhaps the world's most cosmopolitan city); the rubber plantations (with their exploited work force of Chinese, Indians, and Malays); and the Britons' intricate social world (characterized by the cloying ennui and bitter jealousies engendered by a willfully self-contained community). But all the while it tells a story of great narrative intensity: the shocking and relentless Japanese advance that sent British and Australian troops and their vacillating commanders scurrying down the Malay Peninsula, culminating in what Churchill called "the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history." Singapore's fate was sealed almost at the start of the invasion, and Farrell matchlessly conveys the dull terror of incipient disaster that seized that rich, modern, but isolated and artificial metropolis. For decades its fall maintained a profound hold on the British imagination, resulting in scores of detailed and atmospheric memoirs and histories. None convey that event with the drama and complexity of this novel.

In the past decade or so academics have hailed the works of Farrell and Scott as forerunners of "post-colonialist" fiction. I'd therefore dreaded a loopy and pretentious preface. But readers would have been far better off with that than with the perfunctory and irrelevant introduction that the poet Derek Mahon, a friend of Farrell's, provides. Uneven introductions are all one can really criticize in NYRB Books' otherwise superbly selected series of reissues.

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