Introduction: 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.

J.G. Farrell's parents met aboard the SS Ranchi, cruising off the coast of Norway, in 1929. His mother, Prudence Josephine (Jo) Russell, was nineteen; his father Bill, nine years her senior, was on six months’ leave from India, where he managed a United Molasses Company factory in Chittagong, Bengal, and staying with his parents in Liverpool. The Liverpool–Dublin ferry allowed Bill to pursue his courtship after he had proposed while still aboard the Ranchi. Jo and Bill were married in Rangoon eight months after they first met. Jo returned to England alone for the birth of their first child, Robert, who was born in a nursing home in Reading in April 1932. Bill returned home in 1934 as the Depression hit businesses in all parts of the Empire, and the family moved to Liverpool to be near Bill's terminally ill father, renting a house in West Derby.