Picnics and Panics

By Melvin Maddocks

THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR

by J.G. FARRELL

344 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $7.95.

When an American novelist wants to demonstrate the naivete of Americans, he packs his characters off to Europe. This is known as the Henry James gambit. When a British novelist wishes to display the naivete of Englishmen, he ships his characters out to India. This is known as the E.M. Forster ploy, and nobody has worked it more pointedly than J.G. Farrell, 39, a native of Liverpool and an expatriate himself in such exotic places as Morocco, Mexico and the Canadian Arctic--not to mention India.

The year for Farrell's melodrama of shattered innocence is 1857. Queen Victoria is on her throne, and all is well with the empire, or so it seems to the colonials being ever so English-under-glass in their frontier enclave at Krishnapur. Generals saunter about with cricket bats in their hands. Officers' ladies recite delicately palpitating verses about nature to the poetry society. What picnics one attends! York hams, Cheddar cheese, oysters, spice nuts, candied fruits. Did one ever leave home? And everywhere there are the invisible, obeisant Indians, fanning the Englishman when he is hot, serving him when he is hungry or thirsty--insulating him not only from the squalor, the hardship and the needs of the world outside but also from the slightest threat to his Roman sense of selfesteem.

Pariah Dogs. Then suddenly, inconceivably, mutiny sweeps India, as indeed the Sepoy Rebellion did in 1857, and Novelist Farrell takes his Englishmen out of a quaint hunting print and frames them in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The once happy few, besieged in the compound at Krishnapur for three months, come to resemble the natives they had so exquisitely ignored. Clothes shred, ribs show, sores pustulate, armpits stink. The survivors take on the look (and sometimes the character) of the pariah dogs that clean the corpses to the bone almost before the body stiffens. As the days and weeks pass, it is the Indians' turn to holiday on the hillsides with picnic hampers and opera glasses and watch the new spectator sport: kill the English.

While Indian bullets and swords tear into English flesh, Farrell takes his own aim at the English soul in the person of the Collector, the ranking India Company officer in Krishnapur. The father of seven, an imposing man with side whiskers like the ruff of a cat, he is every inch a hostile cartoonist's Victorian. Before his Indian service he was a leader among the best London charities for the relief of beggars and the redemption of prostitutes. The Collector believes devoutly in the superiority of England and the 19th century. His religion is progress: the faith Farrell puts to trial-by-ordeal at Krishnapur.

Farrell can write with a fury to match his theme. As spectacle, The Siege of Krishnapur has the blaze and the agony of a scenario for hell. But as moral commentary, it is overcalculated--and its ironies unsuitably neat. When the desperate defenders load their cannon with makeshift shrapnel, including silverware and prayer beads, the volley becomes too pat a way of saying: Bang goes civilization!

As always in these contests of tea, cucumber sandwiches and fair play v. the dark demons of the blood, nice guys finish last, or else they turn out to be not so nice after all. Something like this is what Farrell seems to be preaching over his deflowered English Eden. But it is a measure of his fairness--or perhaps our lowering standard of innocence -- that the end of the novel remains open to interpretation. As the rescue force marches in at last, what Farrell notices is that the Collector has lost his faith. What a reader of the besieged '70s notices is that the Collector has survived. > Melvin Maddocks

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