On the other hand, there’s no doubt it is quite funny in places. Gosh, I don’t remember feeling quite so conflicted about a book for a while! On the one hand, it is written as a sort of farcical comedy which is totally at odds with the serious subject matter, especially as the siege progresses and the suffering and death of the British contingent grows. His fears are soon to be realised, and the British will be driven to take refuge in the Residency where they will have to withstand constant attacks, disease and starvation as they wait for the Army to come to their rescue… But still the earth washes away - like faith in British civilisation and a British God.Although life in the small fictional town of Krishnapur is currently peaceful for the British colonial community, the Collector fears trouble – he has been coming across small piles of chapattis left in odd places, and he’s sure he’s heard that this happened somewhere else, just before a native uprising against the representatives of the Raj. As the rains drum down, the defenders try to strengthen their earth ramparts with their jumbled possessions: 'bookcases full of elevating and instructional volumes, embroidered samplers, tea-sets of bone china, humidors and candlesticks, mounted elephants' feet, and rowing-oars with names of college eights inscribed in gilt paint'. He settles for description, and leaves the reader to find the metaphors. Farrell clearly deplored the colonial fantasies that were his great theme: he also wrote about the Irish rebellion of 1916 and the fall of Singapore in 1942.

In the face of death, the British absurdly argue about theology or the Great Exhibition. Violence is recorded with a matter-of-fact coolness, yet it is a very funny book. Farrell focuses on the besieged British garrison: the only Indian character is the local maharajah's son, whose head is full of the latest British fashions, from phrenology to photography, but who comically begins to realise that he has chosen the wrong side. The Best of the Booker has brought this brilliantly imagined story back into the light. Farrell's historical novel, set during the Indian mutiny of 1857, won the Booker prize in 1974, when it was no guarantee of instant celebrity. The novel whose fortunes have been most affected by the recent Best of the Booker poll is not the winner, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, but one of the other shortlisted books, JG Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur.

The siege of krishnapur by jg farrell