Made up of a skilful patchwork of diaries, travel journals and personal letters, this is as close to Farrell’s autobiography as we will ever get.... All his readers will be grateful to encounter once more this wise, impatient, often self-critical voice and will mourn again the sad accident that silenced a writer who would surely have become a major force in modern literature.

Lavinia Greacen, Farrell’s biographer, has put together an illuminating selection of personal writings full of elegance and charm – and, occasionally, with an Anglo-Irish dryness and scepticism.... As a correspondent he is both direct and diverting. His singular voice is geared to conciseness, and to creating an entertaining effect. And an engaging exuberance in his letters is tempered by an urbane reticence... There was no one like him,’ John Banville says in a felicitous preface, ‘nor will there be again.

Another stylish voice is that of the late JG Farrell, whose In His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries (Cork University Press, €39), edited by Lavinia Greacen, is a marvellous collection of writings from a novelist -- Troubles is his masterpiece -- whose early death when he was swept off rocks in Co Cork by a freak wave in 1979 was a tragic loss to literature. But these letters and diary extracts are a boundless joy.

Thirty years ago, in August 1979, 15 people died during a terrible storm that struck the Fastnet yacht race. The former British prime minister Ted Heath, a keen sailor and a participant in the race, very nearly died too. On the same day, but in relatively calm conditions, a man fishing on the rocks at Kilcrohane in Cork was swept away by a freak wave and drowned. Onlookers say that the man did not struggle in the water but seemed to accept his fate calmly. This strangely unforgettable death was suffered by the then 44-year-old James Gordon Farrell, the author of three novels, Troubles, which is set in Ireland, The Siege of Krishnapur, which won the Booker Prize, and The Singapore Grip. By now Farrell's incipient greatness is widely recognised -- he came very closely to snatching the Booker of all Bookers from Salman Rushdie. This recognition would probably have to come to him eventually on merit alone, but its early arrival owes a great deal to Lavinia Greacen who edits these letters meticulously and who published a fine biography in 1999. As with all novelists of genuine originality, Farrell's character is plainly obvious and yet mysterious, almost impossible to grasp or explain. Many geniuses seem to to be forced into art for the first time by the death of a parent or by illness. Farrell belongs in the latter category. His relationship with his Anglo-Irish Protestant parents in Dalkey was -- unlike, say, Samuel Beckett's -- warmly dutiful. But a youthful bout of polio and the claustrophobic experience of being locked up in an iron lung added hurt and distance to a naturally sharp intelligence. This combination of characteristics made him extremely attractive to women, as did, perhaps, an unwillingness to make lasting commitments. As in the song, if he wasn't near the one he loved, he loved the one he was near. Actually, these letters -- and most of them are to women -- show that he was quite capable of juggling with lovers even when they were in close proximity to each other. Again, like most novelists, he had a voyeuristic streak: a German girlfriend, who has allowed her cache of letters to be published but without her name being revealed, was in receipt of repeated requests to explain exactly (and I mean exactly) what it was like to lose her virginity. Farrell was mild-mannered and non-judgmental, but he knew his own mind. When he won the Booker prize, for example, he made a speech criticising the Booker company for their colonialist work practices (they thought it "most unmannerly"). And a friend who asked for advice on his divorce received a stinging letter telling him and his wife to behave themselves for the sake of their children. Add to this steeliness a sense of humour and a dash of the young fogey -- he occasionally gives the impression of being a man in his 60s trying out phrases picked up from the younger generation -- and the reader is guaranteed an experience almost as interesting as a Farrell novel. At the end of his life he seems to have found a new contentment with his new house in Cork. This is not to say that he avoided infuriating troubles from the Department of Posts and Telegraphs (two years to get a phone) and comic troubles from the shopkeepers in Bandon -- "If I had been trying to squeeze the petrol out of her nipples it could hardly have been worth more of a performance." But by the time one reads his last letter, on August 10, 1979, which promises a new novel by the end of the year, the more one is convinced that a degree of lovableness went with his genius. It was a cruel wave that swept him away from Ireland and the world of literature.

When Lavinia Greacen undertook her magisterial yet intimately sympathetic biography of James Gordon Farrell, she gained access to his diaries and many of his letters, especially love letters and letters to his literary agents, editors and publishers about his professional desires and requirements. In this supplementary volume, a selection of her prime sources is presented in their full extent, amounting to a warts-and-all self-portrait of the novelist. It might well serve as an inspiration or a warning. Even with his fecund talent, ardent ambition, sound education (Rossall and Brasenose), eagerness to work and sufficient charm for social survival (English father, Irish mother), writing novels for a living proved intellectually arduous, financially precarious and often desperately lonely. Lavinia Greacen’s new book, with photographs, is a splendid memorial. Its appendix contains a poem dedicated to J.G. Farrell by his friend Derek Mahon. http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/5503533/part_3/a-literary-gypsy.thtml

THE NOVELIST JG Farrell (1935-1979) inspired great affection and esteem in his lifetime, and a mystique survives – owing, in part, to the tragic nature of his early death. (He drowned at Kilcrohane, Co Cork, where he had moved just months before.) His biographer, Lavinia Greacen ( JG Farrell: The Making of a Writer , Bloomsbury 1999), has put together a fascinating and generously annotated selection of his letters to family, friends, agents and publishers, and added vivid passages from his diaries. The result is a moving and memorable portrait of the man, one that his many fans will want to have; and not only fans but, increasingly, students – for Farrell’s fiction, a big hit in its day and never out of print, is now recognised as an important contribution to the post-colonial, or perhaps post-imperial canon, with special reference to the famous “Empire Trilogy”; not really a trilogy but (his own word) a triptych: Troubles (1970), The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and The Singapore Grip (1978). Full review: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/1024/1224257356756.html?via=mr