12 August

Who or what killed J.G. Farrell?

1979 It was on this day that the death of the Booker Prize-winning novelist J.G. Farrell was announced to the world. The exact nature of his death, however, remains mysterious – despite rigorous biographical investigation – to this day.

Had he been born a year later, posterity would probably never have had Farrell’s fiction. When he went up to Oxford in October 1956, ‘Jim’ Farrell was anything but literary. Head boy at his Irish public school, ‘rugger was pretty well my life’, he later recalled.

On 28 November 1956 – the height of the season – Jim Farrell had a bad game. He didn’t feel right in the changing room afterwards, ‘cut the usual drinking session’, took a bus back to college and crawled fully-clothed into bed.

He had polio. Six days later he was in an ‘iron lung – that life-saving apparatus which was half Edgar Allan Poe’s “Buried Alive” and half medieval torture rack’. Jonas Salk’s vaccine became widely available six months later, leading to the eradication of the disease, and the iron lung would join the hook-hand in the medical museum.

When he was recovered sufficiently for ‘physio’ he was three stones lighter, and had shoulders that, to his mortification, he heard one girl call ‘flabby’. It was like the Charles Atlas story in reverse: the husky young athlete had become a 90-pound weakling. Jim Farrell became J.G. Farrell; an ‘outsider’, in the term popularised by Colin Wilson that same year. No longer a player, he became a spectator. The novelist was born.

Farrell scraped a third. It did not faze him. He had already resolved to write. That was what outsiders did best. Over the next few years, he got by on various teaching jobs and travelling fellowships. He compensated for his disability by sexual athleticism, running three or four girlfriends at the same time.

Farrell’s first three ventures in fiction did nothing to separate him from the 1,500 or so novelists every year who try their luck and get nowhere. He was, however, mining his own family background – the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, the Anglo-Indian professional classes, the army-officer caste.

Novelists, like generals, need luck. Troubles, Farrell’s story of the Irish uprising and the battles between the IRA and the Black and Tans, came out in 1970, a few months after Ulster exploded into flames. Few novels have been more timely. Troubles hit the jackpot. And Farrell made it to the top with his Indian Mutiny novel, The Siege of Krishnapur, which won the Booker in 1973.

Farrell, only 38, was rich and famous. He fired his agent and went into tax exile in Kilcrahone, south-west Ireland. Here, living close to the land and the sea, he found, as he said for the first time, douceur de vivre.

There then happened the strange episode of Farrell’s death, aged only 44, on 11 August 1979. He was fishing in high seas near his home and was knocked off the rock on which he was standing by a wave, falling into the water. It was the same storm that would later drown eighteen contestants in the Fastnet yacht race. What was odd, according to witnesses, was that Farrell made no effort to save himself. He did not shout for help and his body was recovered only much later.

Was it suicide? An IRA hit? Is J.G. Farrell, like Elvis, still alive? It remained a mystery for 30 years until the last person to see Farrell alive, Pauline Foley, went on record in The Times (7 February 2010) to recall what actually happened. Foley was walking alongside the rocks with her children:

When Foley … saw him, he was standing on a ledge, wearing wellington boots and holding a fishing rod. Fishing was the first sport Farrell had been able to enjoy since contracting polio. The illness had left him unable to cast the rod overhead with one hand, so instead he tucked the rod under his arm and cast by twisting his body. It made balancing tricky. ‘It was very rough, splashing up on the rocks, but there weren’t killer waves,’ recalled Foley. ‘He turned and waved to the boys. The boys waved back. He turned back, started to cast and slipped. I think it was more of a slip than the waves.’ Farrell made no attempt to save himself. Foley said: ‘I called to him, “I’m coming” … I started to go down there. It was just his head in the water. There was no waving, no call to me. He was just looking at me. All the time he looked at me. I don’t even want to think what he felt.’

What killed him was the long-term debility of his polio. He was too weak to save himself. What made him a writer killed him.