J.G. Farrell’s trilogy Troubles (probably the best novel about the Irish War of Independence) The Siege of Krishnapour and The Singapore Grip are compelling ‘face of empire’ novels that display the British Empire as it appeared to those Britons most directly in contact with the subject peoples. If you want an unvarnished look at the man who wrote them, this is the place to come. In these private writings we see Farrell diligently at work observing and recording his impressions, although we do not learn of his emotional and intellectual responses to the landscapes and people he observes until we read the novels. For his books he re-absorbed his life and research, and the final writing grew out of a well integrated sense of the period and place about which he is writing. His seriousness is shown not only in his great achievements but also in the things he chooses, his cookery book is Child’s superb Mastering the Art of French Cooking, his camera is the incomparable Zeiss Contraflex. Farrell’s private life comes across as strangely detached from his art. The letters and diaries reveal little of how the creation of novels of such depth and breadth grew out of his experience and understanding but they do help us to understand and appreciate the man, and they are entertaining in their own right. The diary does throw a light on Farrell’s struggle to find a form for his matter. On the 18th March, 1967, we see him reflecting ‘on the way Bellow and Nabokov set things up for themselves’. Farrell’s wide reading of fiction is part of his commitment to his writing profession, and he is very much a professional. Unlike so many writers who emerge as more attractive personalities in their letters than in their diaries, with Farrell it is the reverse. In the diaries he reveals himself to be a thoughtful, compassionate, and responsible friend. Yet, in the letters, possibly because so many are to girlfriends of uncertain status, he can come across as just a little awkward, perhaps through an inclination to avoid showing himself in a positive light. The letters illuminate Farrell’s emotional growth. The callow youth becomes a considerably less callow adult, although in his letters he never quite loses his youthful fear of speaking well of himself. His attitude to women is unclear, if not a little strange; referring to Allison Lurie, then in her forties with four major novels under her belt already, as a ‘girl’ looks odd. His letters show us life in literary London which comes across as quite a small village, one where an ambitious but unknown writer can quickly find a place at the dining tables of the famous. But the letters show him working very hard indeed. He is prepared to miss parties, put people off, lose contact with people, to devote more time to writing. He appears to be in the swim of things in London to such an extent that one witnesses his move to rural Ireland with foreboding and it is a surprise that he enjoys west Cork so much. This, after all, is the Ireland of long ago where it could take two years to get a telephone (and the present writer remembers being on the waiting list for five). In fact, Farrell’s relations with Ireland are complex but calm. Many who have written about Ireland have strong and troubled feelings about the country, and feel a need to express them all, Farrell seems to take things as they are, very much Proustian rather than Joycean. The book is well edited. The index is good and the endnotes are perfectly judged, always answering the question that had just sprung to mind and never pile-driving home the obvious. The only slip is in the foreword where the editor mistakenly says that Troubles is set in Wicklow rather than Wexford, hardly a mortal sin. It is not clear if the letters are all that were available or are a selection, in which case on what basis the selection was made. One is, of course, intrigued by the deletions—if they are brief—why not leave in those that don’t intrude on the privacy of the living?

"I may start out with the most serious and measured intentions," J. G. Farrell wrote to a friend in August, 1969 as he was finishing Troubles, his first great novel, but "everything I touch has a habit of turning to the absurd." Bleakly and tragically absurd, as it transpired. Ten years later to the month of that letter, Farrell -- rejoicing in his own little house on the Irish coast, the reward of years of material and emotional sacrifice in the interests of art -- was drowned, swept from his favorite rock while fishing. Indeed, it is impossible to read this fine, revelatory collection of letters and diary entries (J. G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries) and not quail as its denouement approaches with steps of invincible irony. "My book is at last making a little progress," he wrote earlier in that fatal summer, "though it has a rival now -- viz. fishing off the rocks." He boasted of his catch and wrote fondly of his fishing companion, "an old grandpa seal who looks as if he's wearing a Twenties bathing cap" who "watches me with the air of someone who thinks he knows a better way of doing it." And finally, working hard the day before he died, he declared, in his last extant letter: "I'm running a bit behind schedule -- but I'm still confident that barring some unforeseen disaster, I'll provide you with a novel …before the end of the year." Oh, dear. These letters and diary entries show the determination and loneliness of a man who, though well-supplied with girlfriends, gave up marriage, family, and material ease to write novels, three of which are brilliantly idiosyncratic, moving, and very funny depictions of the crumbling British Empire. The selections display Farrell's whimsical melancholy, his sense of the fragility of civilization, and his feeling for the poignancy of little people clutching onto social certainty. They also reveal any number of curious facts, among them that the Majestic Hotel of Troubles was inspired by the burnt-out shell of a hotel on Block Island, RI and that he had thought of writing a novel about "doomed and fantasy-prone" Emperor Maximilian. They are shot through, too, with wonderful self-deprecatory descriptions of his own doings and person. Writing from India, where he was gathering impressions for what became the Booker Prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur, he wrote: "I think I hear whispers in the bazaar that fat Smoothy Sahib will soon be having to purchase new churidars (trousers to you) to enclose his ample proportions." In his foreword to the book, John Banville writes that Farrell's death "was little short of a disaster for English fiction": these pages, filled with personal reflection, acerbic observation, and comic dash, sadly confirm it. .