The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell
Published 1973 · 344 pages · 125,465 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Satire & Humor
How hard is The Siege of Krishnapur to read?
The Siege of Krishnapur scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Farrell uses Victorian period vocabulary and Anglo-Indian terms such as khansamah, punkah and futwah, with exhibition catalogue lists. It is richer than The Great Gatsby but far plainer than Midnight's Children.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Long, ironic periodic sentences with parentheses and ellipses, but always clear and navigable. Closer to Anna Karenina's mid-range than to anything experimental.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Debates about progress, faith and materialism sit inside concrete comic scenes of picnics, daguerreotypes and cannons. Ideas are dramatized in the manner of The Great Gatsby.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Dense with period detail: Exhibition inventions, Company politics, phrenology, military drill, photography chemistry. Many characters, but the plot moves slowly enough to follow.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- The omniscient narrator mocks each character's blind spots, so readers must infer what the Collector and Fleury do not see. Meaning rests on irony rather than hidden facts.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- Chapatis, mud walls, stuffed owls, the mosque and the Padre's sermon to the jars carry meaning. The symbols are signposted but accumulate richly, comparable to The Great Gatsby.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- Satire runs through every scene, from the Collector's earnest talk of Ventilation and Rotation of Crops to the Magistrate's skull measurements. The gap between what characters believe and what the narrator shows is wide, in the vein of Gogol's Dead Souls.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- The supplied chapters end as the siege begins, so the outcome stays open. The book as a whole closes its plot while leaving its judgement of empire unsettled.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Linear chronology with a chorus of rotating viewpoints and comic digressions into the Collector's memories. More varied than 1984 but not experimental.
How The Siege of Krishnapur is regarded
The Siege of Krishnapur holds a literary regard score of 64 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Prizes
- Booker Prize 1973, winner
Where the story of The Siege of Krishnapur takes place
- India, 1857, the main setting
- Krishnapur, India, 1857-1858 (1857 to 1858), the main setting