Fiction By J. G. Farrell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ?2.25) The Siege of Krishnapur is about an imagined episode in the Indian Mutiny. It is concerned particularly with the imperial British, their loyal Sikhs and an Indian jprinceling who are be- seiged in the Residency of Mr Farrell's; town of Krishnapur. This is situated far inland, con- nected Wvfith the coast only by a dak ghary (post-coach), which lumbers fortnightly across the vast and dusty plain with mail and passengers. But after the preliminaries of the story the rebellious sepoys throw a circle round the town. The gharry comes no longer. An historical novel, then: a form considered these days to be rather suspect, an excuse for dressing up routine adventures in fahcy clothes. But Mr Farrell chooses it from other motives. The central question posed by him in the novel seems to be: how does a large group of people behave .when subjected to long stress ? And he isolates his people from contemporary over- tones and irrelevancies by placing them far back in time- much as the-late L. H. Myers did in his great novel, The Near and the Far. This is nct to sa'y that the book is set in Never-Never Land. Far. rell's mid-nineteenth century is real enough. The cannons pound. The cholera rages. Theology matters. Women are sheltered. Sex is a- demon you keep locked up. The Great Exhibition-only six years gone-has provided proof of the rightness of the gospel of industrial expansion. All accept this, except, perhaps, for the young, well-brought-up, quasi-intellectual Fleury, who feels, like Arnold and Clough. that the blossoming world of gadgetry with its "sick hurry and divided aims " may be sow- ing dragons' teeth among the corn. Hopkins, the Collector-the Chief Administrator-stands at the heart of the book. He is a man proud of his country's achievement, confident of the rightness of national policies and of the public attitude: a con- formist ? Yes, but intelligent and resilient too, a man who can enforce his independently- taken decisions and who is obsessed, as Clough was, with " those terrible notions of duty ". It is to him that the others look as the sepoys fight their way closer. Suspense and subtlety, humour and horror, the near- neighbourliness of heroism and insanity: it is rare to find such divergent elements being con- trolled in one hand and being raced, as it were, in one yolk. But Farrell manages just this here: his imaginative insight and technical virtuosity com- bine to produce a novel of quite outstanding quality. Beryl Bainbridge's The Dress- maker (Duckworth, ?2.35) is sharp, short, cold, exact and sur- prising. The time is 1944. Rita lives with Aunt'Nellie and Aunt Margo, because Uncle Jack, her father, became a widower when she was five, and handed over control to Nellie. Nellie is strong-minded, a busy dress- maker who domineers, and is liable, if seriously crossed, to fleeting moments of destructive insanity. Girls of Rita's age watch the strolling, predatory GIs with glances that are scared or beckoning according to tem-' perament. Rita is a scared one, but gradually allows herself to become obsessed by the illiterate Ira. It is at this point that Nellie, scissors in hand, finds them one day in the boxroom.... Every word counts in this macabre, strongly imagined little story. In The Whore-Mother (Cape, ?2.25) Shaun Eerron has written a very violent stoiy about the Utlster tragedies. It is a pursuit- narrative. McManus, the young, middle-class Catholic, is drawn by the rhetoric of' the Irish past into ioining tha IRA. But he shteers away from; the execu- tioner's role, goes on the run, only to be hunted down and shot. The book is at once nauseating and slick. Should such utter debasement of the human spirit be paraded in quite this way ? Doesn't Liam O'Flaherty in The Informer, a novel on a similar theme but now nearly 50 years old, succeed infinitely better because with him the savagery is less explicit -and less glib? ? - David Williams . Fiction The Siege of Krishnapur