Indroduction: locating Liverpool

James Gordon Farrell was born in Liverpool on 25 January 1935 and christened five weeks later on 3 March at the Church of St Mary the Virgin in West Derby. His family, on both sides, had strong Liverpool connections, as Lavinia Greacen details in her excellent biography, J.G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer, though neither family had deep Liverpudlian roots. On his father's side the O'Farrells had emigrated from Ireland, dropping the prefix – which identified them as Irish and, misleadingly, as Catholic – when they settled in Liverpool. Farrell's grandfather, Thomas James Farrell, was a successful wine and spirit merchant; his father, William (Bill), born in 1900, was, in Greacen's words, ‘shaped by the red-bricked certainties of turn-of-the-century Liverpool’. Bill grew up in Kremlin Drive in Stoneycroft, a respectable suburb, but close enough to the docks for Bill to feel ‘the pulse of an invisible empire’, a pulse that would later beat through Farrell's three major novels, Troubles (1970), The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), and The Singapore Grip (1978), commonly, though somewhat inaccurately, referred to as his ‘empire trilogy’, and, in more muted fashion, through his unfinished novel, posthumously published as The Hill Station (1981). The Russells on his mother's side journeyed in a contrary direction, moving from London to Liverpool, where her grandfather, a ship's captain, was based until his retirement; her father, inspired by the successful example of an uncle, emigrated to Ireland. For Farrell, Ireland seemed destined to be mediated through Liverpool.