Selected Letters and Diaries

Cork University Press Hardback €39.00

The novelist J. G. Farrell – known to his friends as Jim – was drowned on 11 August 1979 when he was swept off rocks by a sudden storm while fishing in West Cork. He was in his early forties. ‘Had he not died so young,’ remarked Salman Rushdie in 2008, ‘there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary.’

The Siege of Krishnapur, the second of Farrell’s Empire Trilogy, won the Booker prize in 1973, and it was selected as one of only six previous winners to compete in the 2008 international ‘Best of Booker’ competition. The strength of American interest in Farrell’s books is underlined by the inclusion of all three trilogy novels in the Classics imprints of New York Review Books.

Many of these selected letters are written to women whom Jim Farrell loved and whom he inadvertently hurt. His ambition to be a great writer in an age of minimal author’s earnings ruled out the expense of marriage and fatherhood, so self-sufficiency was his answer. Books Ireland has astutely portrayed him as: ‘a mystery wrapped in an enigma, a man who wanted solitude and yet did not want it, wanted love but feared commitment, reached out again and again but, possibly through fear of rejection, was always the first to cut the cord.’ But Farrell’s kindness, deft humour and gift for friendship reached across rejection, which must account for why so many such letters were kept.

Funny, teasing, anxious and ambitious, these previously unpublished letters to a wide range of friends give the reader a glimpse of this private man. Ranging from childhood to the day before his death, Farrell’s distinctive letters have the impact of autobiography.