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World Hotels - The Singapore Grip (New York Review Books Classics)
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List Price: $17.95
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Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781590171363
ISBN: 1590171365
Label: NYRB Classics
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 584
Publication Date: 2005-01-31
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Release Date: 2005-01-31
Studio: NYRB Classics
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Editorial Reviews:
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Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming—what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett's price-fixing and market manipulation—but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end.
A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip completes the “Empire Trilogy” that began with Troubles and the Booker prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: british in hot weather
Comment: this is a magnificant book. the plot and characters twist and turn with the slow realization that the end of their way a life gets closer and closer. the author creates a feeling a mood that sucks you in and you begin to feel as if you are in singapore in the prewar years and thrown into the eventual fall of singapore
Customer Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Comment: Farrell is kind of comic Tolstoy except vastly underappreciated, and this novel has it all--laughs, history, gallantry, foolishness, great atmospherics and of course luscious prose. It's like Vanity Fair, except Thackeray joked about not being among the leading war novelists, whereas that mantle fits nicely on Farrell. Get it, you can't go wrong.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Tolstoy of the Asian Theater
Comment: A vast and absorbing work of historical fiction, this magnificent novel is set in Singapore, in the months leading to the fall of the city to the Japanese in 1942. The unexpected and total defeat of the commonwealth allies by forces whose fighting abilities they had previously pooh-poohed has been called the worst defeat in British military history. Farrell describes these events very well, both by getting inside the minds of the real-life commanders and by inventing more humble characters on both sides who experience the fighting at first hand. But the main focus of the book is on the civilians, especially the merchant princes whose forefathers founded the colony at the southern tip of the Malay peninsula in the early nineteenth century, and the fictional firm of Blackett and Webb in particular.
The central figure at the start of the book is the rubber millionaire Walter Blackett, immensely proud of his firm's tradition, but concerned about handing it over to the next generation. Recognizing that his son Monty is a useless playboy, he concentrates on finding a suitable match for his elder daughter Joan, who has both brains and beauty. Much of the early part of the book has the romantic wit of Jane Austen, the dynastic maneuvering of John Galsworthy, and the jazz-age pizzazz of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The philosophical antithesis to Walter is Matthew Webb, the estranged son of his long-retired business partner, who arrives to take over his father's estate. Innocent and idealistic, he provides a pair of fresh eyes with which to view the colony. And what he sees first puzzles then horrifies him: exploitation of the native growers, the creation of a dependent economy rather than one that can be locally self-sustaining, and the manipulation of prices through a rubber cartel that holds the rest of the world to ransom. Matthew has much charm; in a rather confused way he eventually discovers passion; by the end of the book he has become a strong man of action; but his naive idealism never leaves him. Here the author who most comes to mind is Tolstoy, with Matthew the spiritual descendant of Levin in ANNA KARENINA.
Farrell is Tolstoyan too in his apparently effortless juggling of world events with personal intimacies, in the range of his characters from the mighty to the insignificant, in the fact that his people grow or decline, in his social awareness and moral conscience, and in his sheer ability to tell a story. Like WAR AND PEACE, this is a long book, and I read it during a three-week period when sometimes I could only manage a chapter or two a day, but never once did I lose the onward momentum or my interest in the characters and their situation; there are very few books that can promise that. The only thing that slightly disappointed me was the love story; Farrell's erotic scenes are somewhat more explicit than Tolstoy's, but there is little sense of grand romance, no Pierre and Natasha, no Kitty worthy of this Levin.
THE SINGAPORE GRIP is the third novel in JG Farrell's so-called "Empire Trilogy." The books are connected in that all deal with various moments in the decline of the British Empire, but they expand notably in scope. The first, TROUBLES, though set in the Irish War of Independence, is essentially a social comedy in form, focused on a group of mostly-elderly people living in a crumbling seaside hotel. The small enclave has become larger in the second novel, THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR, where it is an entire garrison town under siege by sepoys in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. That book also expands the range and number of its characters, enabling the author to portray through them a great variety of attitudes in Victorian Britain towards religion, duty, and colonialism in all its aspects. With THE SINGAPORE GRIP, the enclave is now an entire city-state, and the range is wider still, now extending its political vision to the global scale and having a great deal more to say about commerce and economics. It shows an author Tolstoy-like in his vision, and very close to Tolstoy in his powers.
And the meaning of the title? The Singapore Grip might be any of several things, such as a rattan suitcase or a touch of the flu. But the most special meaning is revealed only at the end, a last touch of the humor that has never been totally absent from this book, no matter how grim the events that it describes.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Historical fiction/commentary at its finest
Comment: (Four-and-a-half stars) In "The Singapore Grip," Farrell convincingly recreates Singapore, 1942, on the verge of its fall to the Japanese. Each of the novels in Farrell's Empire trilogy are fantastic. "Grip", unlike its predecessors, suffers perhaps from a slight case of logorrhea; even so, it's a formidable, fascinating, at times downright funny book. Farrell has an uncanny ability to root out and deflate pretension and hypocrisy wherever it exists, and that's what he does here, to incredible comic effect. The buffoonish tycoon Walter Blackett is a solid stand-in for British imperalism at its blindest--having convinced himself of the great service he's supposedly done for the natives of Singapore, he struggles to maintain his rubber empire even in the face of steadily encroaching chaos. He is surrounded by characters of depth and interest: the skeptical Dupigny; the well-meaning but naive Matthew Webb; the "divided" Ehrendorf; and the wonderfuly droll Major Archer (already familiar to readers of Farrell's equally-terrific "Troubles"). Each of these men, in their own way, flesh out the novel's vision of colonialism and the pitfalls of world diplomacy.
Amid spectacular battle scenes and a dizzying wealth of information about the rubber industry, tax shelters, and military strategy, Farrell manages to hop nimbly from scenes of tragedy to hilarity to suspense and political commentary. In short, "The Singapore Grip", like the previous works in the Empire trilogy, has it all (including a terrifically ambiguous title--what is the "Singapore Grip" anyway? Read this book and you'll be able to answer that in 1,001 ways.)
Thanks to the New York Review of Books, American readers can now enjoy Farrell's work; which is great, since he deserves the widest possible readership.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Very Gripping
Comment: Perhaps a great part of the reason for these encomiastic reviews is the apt comparison between British hubris then in re the Japanese and current American hubris in re Iraq. - I simply don't know. - I do know, however, that I can not share in this universal laud. The book is a stylistic flop. The writing is clunky and flat. The characters, while admittedly droll at times, aren't very well threshed out. ---But my main objection to the work is that it is tendentious. Any "novel" in which the "novelist" suddenly switches to the first person in one chapter to compare what he is fictionalising to his own experience, only to revert to the fictionalization in the next chapter, and in which the last chapter is a hypothetical political lesson, is not the work of a master stylist, who would have worked these things seamlessly into the novel without these jolting digressions, but the work of a writer whose primary goal is political and would have been better off sticking to the essay.
Readers would be much better off reading an historical account (which one reviewer here provides excerpts of in his review) of the fall of Singapore. - The facts and real characters are actually much more droll and interesting - than reading this...whatever it is.
I suppose I'm wasting my breath. But, really, someone has to put plainly, for instance, that the three meanings of the title are not in any way "clever." Rather, they are contrived and twee. Farrell admits the contrived part in the Afterword to my edition concerning the erotic meaning, revealing that he learned of it from The Chinese Way of Love, but that he has been "unable to resist taking a hand in it myself."
Again, if you must read something about Singapore's fall, read the actual, fascinating history. If you must read something by Farrell, read Troubles, a novel free of all the blunderings here.
Three stars for the historical interest, which may serve as an impetus for the reader to look into historical accounts. But, otherwise, this book just doesn't have much of a hold.
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