Ian Jack BEYOND BELIEF by VS Naipaul (Little, Brown R89,95)
In 1979 and 1980, VS Naipaul made a tour of Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia and reached the conclusion, in Among the Believers, that Islam was a poor receptacle for political needs; it couldnt teach people how to run a modern state.
Fifteen years later, he made a tour of the same countries and in his new book reaches a further conclusion:that because the Islam in these countries is what he calls the Islam of converts Arabs being the original believers it has cut off people from their pasts and caused them to develop fantasies about who and what they are. In them, there is an element of neurosis and nihilism.
But perhaps this isnt so much a new conclusion as an expansion of the first. Naipaul denies that Beyond Belief has any conclusions.
His book is solely made from the complex stories of the people he has met or met again. So perhaps it is better to think of his view as a working thesis.
Naipaul offers no comparisons with Christianity and its effect on converted peoples, nor has he visited Arab countries to demonstrate how, say, Saudis are less fantastical and neurotic than Iranians. So perhaps it is better again to think of this thesis as a prejudice; sometimes moderated by the people he meets, but always stubbornly there and finding new ways to seep into the narrative.
I would have it no other way, because Naipaul could write a book in no other way and any book by him is worth having. Stretches of it are as good as anything he has ever written, but sometimes it is not an easy book to carry on reading. There is a sense of scraping away, not at the bottom of the barrel, but in the way Naipaul now approaches the act of writing; a search for some kind of purity, or a prophylactic against exhaustion.
He writes in his introduction of his steady retreat from travel books of landscape and autobiography in which he features as the writer-traveller. Now he has pared himself from the script to become what he was at the beginning of his career a writer of fiction, a manager of narrative, where other peoples stories come to the front.
This is a tricky business. The stories of individual lives are quite properly shown to be intricate and subtle. Islam has touched them in different ways at different times with spectacularly various results.
But Naipaul exaggerates his withdrawal. Hes always there as the listener and interlocutor, puzzling over his notes, regretting his failure to ask a vital question, going back to rectify a gap. People have filled his books ever since he met some West Indian migrants on a Southampton boat-train in The Middle Passage 36 years ago. The difference now is that Naipaul is more scrupulous with them, and more concerned to discover why they are as they are.
He has also moderated his judgments; he sees people in a more sympathetic light. Occasionally the old, comically fastidious, Brahminical persona shoots through (the chambermaid was fat and brassy … with a definite smell from wearing so many clothes, some of them perhaps of synthetic material), but he usually manages to place himself in the context of his subjects stories with the sly, rhythmic craft that has made him one of the very best writers of English prose, alive or dead.
Still, I would not want him as my therapist. There is tension in the book between understanding, even celebrating, individual lives, and at the same time punishing them for their lack of wholeness (an old Naipaul notion).
At times, entire societies are savaged for their unsustainable political beliefs. It is difficult to disagree with his verdicts on Pakistan and Iran, or with the proposition that religious or cultural purity is a fundamentalist fantasy … [Outside tribal communities] everyone lives in his own way with his complexity, but interesting to see that he wont allow fantasy to be part of this complexity.
It can be, of course, a particularly dangerous fantasy. There is (or was) in Tehran a Mr Jaffrey, a reporter who believes in the jam towhidi, the society of believers. He is Indian, but because India was dominated by Hindus he leaves for Pakistan.
Because Pakistan is dominated by Sunnis, and he is a Shia, he then quits Pakistan for Iran. Then the Ayatollah Khomeinis revolution comes at last, the true society of believers! but soon Jaffrey is an unhappy as before. In 1979 he is at his typewriter rapping out peppery calls for the mullahs to get back to their mosques.
When Naipaul returns 16 years later, he learns Jaffreys fate. He was wanted by revolutionary students they had found payments to him from the Voice of America and he had fled back to Pakistan and there he had died. Mr Jaffreys dream of the jam towhidi was to him so pure and sweet that he hadnt begun to go into its contradictions …
There is Mr Ali, an early supporter of Irans revolution, who says: We expected something heavenly to happen … We all thought revolution was something beautiful, done by God, something like music, like a concert … We were happy that we were part of the theatre. We were the actors now. Then other actors put him in prison.
Naipaul writes at his precise, observational best in such sections, but at the heart of this book there seems to me something unresolved and unexpectedly mystical.
Puzzling over the fundamentalist rage against the [pre-Islamic] past in these countries of Muslim conversion, he describes his own history, how, when still quite young, he began to feel that there was an incompleteness, an emptiness about his birthplace, Trinidad, and that the real world existed somewhere else. Much later, he saw the roadside shrines of Bombay and realised that people who lived so intimately with the idea of the sacredness of their earth were different from us. He concludes: Perhaps it is this absence of the sense of sacredness that we of the New World travel to the Old to discover. It may be. But loose ideas are at work here, and the sacredness of particular pieces of earth has supplied more neurosis and fantasy in the past century than Islamic conversion has managed. It has a particularly glorious period between 1933 and 1945, in Germany.
By the standards of Naipauls previous work, this is not a great book.
But I can think of few other writers engaged in the business of depicting the real who could come close to matching many parts of it.