Sherien read and liked Sandybanks's review of The Siege of Krishnapur:

"In The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell exposes colonialism as what it really was: a Victorian folly riddled with hypocrisy and exploitation, a fact that gradually became apparent during the Great Mutiny of 1857. The various characters holed up ins...more In The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell exposes colonialism as what it really was: a Victorian folly riddled with hypocrisy and exploitation, a fact that gradually became apparent during the Great Mutiny of 1857. The various characters holed up inside the Company’s Residency in Krishnapur each represent the different faces of the British colonialism: the Collector, a conscientious bureaucrat whose mission is to bring Western science and civilization (as exemplified by the Great Exhibition of 1851) to India; the Padre, who wants to deliver the people of India from heathenish superstitions; Harry Dunstaple, a young soldier whose sole interest is his military career in the Company’s army; the Magistrate, a cynical official obsessed with the ‘science’ of phrenology; and Fleury, an aspiring Romantic poet who has recently arrived in India with his widowed sister, Miriam. The whole lot of them, including Harry’s sister Louise and a band of loyal Company servants, spend increasingly desperate months being besieged by mutinous sepoys.

Farrell has a fine eye for the ridiculous as well as the macabre; while pariah dogs and vultures feast on human and animal carcasses outside the ramparts of the Residency, Fleury and Dunstaple have to figure out how to scrape off swarming insects from a young lady’s naked body without outraging Victorian modesty. A Cholera epidemic rages while the two resident doctors argue about its cause. And during a desperate bout of fighting, the Magistrate, feeding his obsession, surreptitiously feels up other people’s heads.

The only native character that Farrell describes in some depth is Hari, the English-educated son of the Maharaja of Krishnapur, a passionate advocate of ‘progress’ that comes from the West. However, his sole encounter with Fleury ends up in mutual misunderstanding, and while visiting the Residency to offer his support, he is taken hostage by the British. The sepoys and the rest of the native population are as alien and hostile as the vast Indian plains that threaten to engulf the tiny British enclave. Ultimately, despite all of their efforts to impose their values on the Indians, the colonials are simply irrelevant to a country that they barely understand. A lesson that could very well apply to modern day Western powers that occupy foreign countries in the name of progress.

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Sherien read and liked Sandybanks's review of Les Miserables (Wordsworth Classics: Volume One and Two), By Victor Hugo:

""Conscience is the highest justice”.

It is surely an understatement to call Les Miserables a sprawling epic. In fact, it is perhaps the loosest, baggiest monster of all those great 19th century novels. This monster contains everythi...more "Conscience is the highest justice”.

It is surely an understatement to call Les Miserables a sprawling epic. In fact, it is perhaps the loosest, baggiest monster of all those great 19th century novels. This monster contains everything: morality play, melodrama, political tracts, religious polemic and urban history. Hugo’s great bag of a novel is big enough to contain all those and more. He has a healthy ego, and is perpetually eager to pontificate on subjects as diverse as the battle of Waterloo, monastic history, the jet jewelry industry, the development of the argot and the sewer system of Paris. The effect is like having a retired professor camping out in your living room, always ready with an impromptu lecture or two. These mini-lectures, which are almost encyclopedic in their details, give a fascinating picture of the different aspects of French life at that time. But every time Hugo gets up on the soapbox to talk politics, he bores me to tears. These political lectures are delivered in a polemical, disjointed style which nuances are hard to grasps unless you are intimately familiar with French history of the period. And these digressions tend to occur in the middle of the exciting parts of the main story. What happens at the barricade? Is he killed? Wait; let’s wax poetic about flowers for a few pages first. Jean Valjean escapes through the sewer! Wait --- you’ve got to read this dissertation on the sewer system of Paris first. You get the idea. Yet, somehow, it doesn’t matter, as these digressions (except for the abovementioned political op-eds) are often as absorbing as the main narrative.

And what is the main narrative? At its heart, Les Miserables is a moving parable of mercy and redemption, a meditation on justice and conscience that makes us reflect on our own lives. Hugo’s France, with its crumbling tenements, abandoned street children and revolutions may be history to the Western world, but it is still alive and well in parts of the developing world. The barricades still have resonance today. Yes, Hugo could be sentimental and verbose, didactic and pedantic. He is not averse to use improbable coincidences (or divine providence, as another fellow reader had kindly pointed out) to tie up his storylines. He could have used a good editor with a big red pen. But again, it doesn’t matter in the big picture, as we are swept away in the stories of Jean Valjean, Bishop Myriel, Gavroche, Marius, Cosette and Eponine. Their stories, despite the melodrama and Romantic trappings, are the eternal story of man’s struggle against himself and society to live a good life, to be kind and forgiving to his fellows, to sacrifice one’s life selflessly for the good of others. Conscience is the highest justice, indeed.

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