Picador £16.99 pp294
Half a Life, V S Naipaul’s previous novel, seemed, when it was published three years ago, to be metaphorical. The central character, William Somerset Chandra, “Willie”, had a name that belonged to someone else (Somerset Maugham, who encountered Chandra’s father on a visit to India and alluded to him in the resultant travel book), and Willie’s life was no more authentically his own than that name. As a child growing up on an ashram offering what to him seemed phoney spiritual solace, as a lonely student in London, and as the idle husband of the heiress to an estate in a Portuguese colony in Africa, Willie was so alienated, so emotionally and politically disengaged from the world through which he drifted, that he could justly be said to be only half-living. It now transpires that the title was also to be read literally. Half a Life told only half the story. Magic Seeds is its sequel, giving us, not quite the other half, but three further instalments, each one complementary to a section of the previous book.
Naipaul, when he chooses, writes prose of all-but-matchless beauty, but for these two late novels he has abjured the mellifluous sentence, the elegantly turned paragraph, the narrative structure that circles musically around to arrive at an exquisite consummation. Those things, as he has repeatedly demonstrated, are easily within his scope, but his purpose here requires a different manner. These are bleak, sad stories set in a comfortless world, and the manner of their telling is accordingly plain (but not simple), as though their author has vowed himself to verbal asceticism in pursuit of a hard truth.
When Magic Seeds begins, Willie, aged 40, has left his wife, left the easy but futile life of a dependent spouse, left Africa and its conflicts. He is in Berlin with his sister, a politically radical television director, who nags and shames him into returning to India to participate in a guerrilla war of liberation. Almost as soon as he arrives in the unnamed city where he is to meet his contact he regrets his decision. This new life is no more of his own choosing than any of his previous ones have been. But it is forbidden to turn back: much later Willie himself will be an accessory to the murder of a man who wants to leave “the movement”.
Advertisement
For years, he moves from one camp to another deep in the forest, “liberating” villages, supposedly fomenting a revolution of which he doesn’t see the purpose and listening at night to the wing-beats and agonised cries of birds attempting to escape predators and regain the freedom and safety of the upper air. For them, as for him, he thinks, that “upper air” is no more accessible than a mirage.
Eventually, he turns himself in. In prison, and in despair, he finds a kind of peace. But his sister and a campaigning lawyer he met in London nearly 30 years before contrive his release, on condition that he leaves India for good. He comes to London to stay with the lawyer, Roger. There he finds adulterous relationships, financial corruption and petty snobbery. Roger talks to him about the entire class of people who, a generation or two back, were employed as domestic servants and whose descendants are now socially displaced. Roger’s harangues on the British working class are as misanthropic as anything Naipaul has ever written, but they have a bitter potency; Roger’s vision of a brutal, destructive underclass echoes and matches Willie’s actual experience as one of a malevolent invisible army intent on sweeping away a social and political order.
We are revisiting territories (geographical, ideological, psychological) that Naipaul has been exploring for decades. But to return is not — for a writer of Naipaul’s questing intelligence and nuanced sensitivity — to repeat. This novel’s final section is a kind of reprise in a different, less hectic, more sombre key and tempo, of the account in Half a Life of Willie’s student years. He meets the same people, but he himself is changed.
A recurrent theme of these novels is the question of identity, of whether a person, in adapting to drastically various circumstances, actually ceases to be the person he or she once was. In bringing Willie back to London, Naipaul poses that question dramatically, and seems to answer it in his concluding scene, a wedding at which Willie sees an Afro-Caribbean man he knew back in the 1960s walking hand in hand with his blond, white-skinned grandchild. A leopard may change his spots, and, in a chronically unstable world, he had better do so if he can.
Advertisement
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £13.59 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585