The Singapore Grip

By J.G. Farrell
Introduction by Derek Mahon

Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming—what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett's price-fixing and market manipulation—but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end.

A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip completes the “Empire Trilogy” that began with Troubles and the Booker prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur.

Reviews

The author of the Booker Prize-winning The Siege of Krishnapur sets this brilliant work in Singapore in 1939, as an old English firm tries to cash in on the impending world war. A complex, often funny meditation on empire and other matters.
— Martin Levin, The Globe and Mail

In Singapore. . . Farrell makes a heroic and memorable attempt to portray and understand not only the Japanese, but also the lives of the millions of poor, oppressed, displaces and dying whose destruction came about through no fault of their own, who were swept helplessly away by the tides of commercial interest and war.
— Margaret Drabble

a triumph of organisation and fictional assimilation of massive amounts of documentary material. . . . [Farrell] is telling not just a story, but history itself, from inside and outside
— John Spurling

The Singapore Grip is an enterprising, intelligent and—as might be expected—highly readable saga.
— Jeremy Lewis, The Times of London

This brilliantly idiosyncratic and funny writer's most successful novel. Farrell's imagination is remarkable for its depth and intensity . . . his relaxed prose is both ironic and warm . . . Farrell's characters are as unique as the densely imagined worlds in which they move.
— Timothy Mo, The New Statesman

The story's progress has been beautifully planned and carried out, so that it moves with leisurely inevitability towards the city's doom.
— Julian Symons, TLS

[The Singapore Grip] has the detachment and repose of great art . . . [it] is, I believe, his finest book.
— Derek Mahon

[This] vivid, multi-dimensional portrait of Singapore . . . is a superbly constructed book, enjoyable on many different levels.
— The Sunday Times

A brilliant, complex, richly absurd and melancholy monument to the follies and splendours of Empire.
— Hilary Spurling

Although the class of ideas is central to Farrell's purpose, the ideas themselves are borne lightly, wittily, on an eventful narrative of exceptional imagination and scope. The story is long and leisurely but suspenseful nevertheless, involving a sure sense of place and history and scores of characters whose fates become a matter of compelling interest.
— Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

Also see:

Troubles By J.G. Farrell Introduction by John Banville Troubles is a hilarious and heartbreaking work by a modern master of the historical novel.

The Siege of Krishnapur By J.G. Farrell Introduction by Pankaj Mishra The Siege of Krishnapur— thought by many to be Farrell's finest novel—chronicles the year of the Great Mutiny in India, when the sepoys turned in bloody rebellion against their complacent British overlords.

J. G. Farrell Collection The Singapore Grip, Troubles, and The Siege of Krishnapur

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