I'm on a run of three 200,000-word+ novels. I read Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries and I'm now a third of the way through J.G. Farrell's sixth and last completed novel, The Singapore Grip and after that Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. Whether I'll get through all that by the end of the year is a good question. The Catton and Tartt and both nearer 300k than 200k.
I've had a reading project with J.G. Farrell this year, and have reread Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur and read the other four novels, including the three from the Sixties which are hard to find, and the first two (A Man from the Elsewhere and The Lung, both published as by "James Farrell") change hands for three or four figures on used book sites. I had to get them via an inter-county library loan as Hampshire Libraries didn't have them. The third novel, A Girl in the Head, was the one which had a paperback reprint after the author's death in 1979 and was the one I liked the least. The Sixties novels are contemporary-set comedy-dramas (all about 70k words) and are of interest but are all minor works and tended to be a little derivative, of Malcolm Lowry, Vladimir Nabokov and others. The Lung was the best of them for me, a black comedy clearly based on personal experience: Farrell, like his protagonist, had had polio and had spent time in an iron lung.
You can see a big jump in the three years between A Girl in the Head and Troubles, in word count as well as achievement, and it's the Empire Trilogy (which might have been a Quartet with The Hill Station, the unfinished novel published after his death) is what his reputation will stand on. The Singapore Grip, set in that country during WW2, is written in third person omni, and there's a remarkable chapter which goes from one character to another during the course of a night, ending with the death of a native character in a bombing raid.
