Only someone who knows VS Naipaul’s life and work well would have recognised a familiar event that preceded the publication of Half a Life (Picador), the slightest book Naipaul has ever written and unquestionably the weirdest.
“Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” some people might observe of the author of Sir Vidia’s Shadow. But the fact is that, even though I have suggested that Naipaul is a sourpuss, a cheapskate and a blamer, I have the highest regard for his work.
As for the event, about a month ago, without any noticeable provocation, Naipaul attacked the work and reputations of EM Forster, James Joyce, Dickens, Stendhal, JM Keynes, Wole Soyinka and the recently deceased RK Narayan. We who know Naipaul understand that gratuitous outbursts such as this nearly always precede the appearance of a Naipaul work. In spirit it is like a boxer’s frenzy of boasting and threats before an important match.
Naipaul is not an envious man and he has famously said that he has no competitors or rivals. But from time to time he exhibits immense anger –with people, with books, with the world. His anger is never frustration with himself or his work, but always projective: drawing a bead on an object and attempting to destroy it. Politicians and public figures have also been the targets of his rage, but let us stick to books. In the 1950s, when he was writing West Indian novels, he attacked his fellow West Indian novelists; in the 1960s, when he published An Area of Darkness and his India journalism, he attacked Indian writers. South American writers came in for a beating in the 1970s; he was writing about Argentina then. A Bend in the River, set in Africa, was accompanied by denunciations of the African novel and mockery of African novelists.
Three years ago at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival before a large audience, video and tape recorders whirring, he declared himself to have no plans to write a novel. Two years ago he complained to an interviewer: “I am being pressed to write a novel.” His subsequent book contract was a gossip-column item. He then wrote Half a Life. A month before publication he trashed the authors mentioned above in a literary magazine.
His widely reprinted remarks were not closely reasoned literary criticism, but delivered verbally to a journalist — the sort of explosive abuse you get from someone whose Valium has worn off. The attack is so seemingly gratuitous that you look for a reason. Certainly it displays a sort of consistency, for in almost every case the writers he attacks have been associated with him by critics under the labels “colonial”, “Commonwealth”, “exiled”, “Indian”.
But I think the outburst has a deeper origin. It seems to have two motives. The first, of course, is the subtext of all the previous attacks: “I am incomparable.” In the second he intends to demonstrate how his new novel is superior to the specific writers and books he attacks. These bear directly upon Half a Life. The novel is Forsterian in its Indian setting and characters; Narayanesque in being south Indian and small-town; W Somerset Maugham makes an appearance in it. Joyce figures in Naipaul’s rant because he was preoccupied with new ways of telling a story: Half a Life, exhibiting Naipaul’s frustration with the traditional novel form, contains several attempts at novelties of narration.
The last third of the novel is set in Africa — thus the swipe at Soyinka. It features a Stendhalian character-type: the young man from the provinces. Willie, Naipaul’s hero, comes from the subcontinent, but is landless and lost, like Neville Landless in Edwin Drood. This could explain the detestation of Dickens. Every particular of Naipaul’s outburst prefigures Half a Life and comprises a sort of disclaimer.
And this book badly needs a disclaimer. Half a Life describes the first 41 years of a man named William Somerset Chandran. You are not supposed to find this funny. He was named for the celebrated writer who visited India and was so impressed with an Indian ascetic who had taken a vow of silence that he used the man as a character in The Razor’s Edge. This detail contains an element of truth: the India visit mentioned in A Writer’s Notebook and The Razor’s Edge contains some of the sadhu’s gnomic utterances that Naipaul tailors to his use. (This is not the first time that a character in a Naipaul novel has appeared in someone else’s book.) To memorialise the episode the unnamed Indian calls his son after Maugham.
What sounds jolly here in its potted form is not jolly at all in the book. The father is a Hindu zealot who, following the Mahatma’s suggestion, drops out of university, vows “to marry the lowest person I could find”, and so takes up with an untouchable — a “backward”. He loathes the young woman, and justifies his loathing by claiming that in crossing the caste divide he is making a huge sacrifice. To his surprise the girl has human characteristics and a sense of herself, though he sees this as putting on airs. He is disgusted by her, hates her voice and is revolted by her pregnancy.
The son Willie, named in homage, grows up despising and despairing of his father, making this one of a number of father-and-son stories on Naipaul’s shelf. Willie sees no future for himself in India and decides to go to Canada. He makes it as far as London. He lives as a 20-year-old, without ageing at all, through the late 1950s — Suez and the Notting Hill riots figure — and is only 41 at the end of the book, though he should be Naipaul’s age, 69. Willie writes scripts for the BBC, as Naipaul did; he is urged to read Hemingway, as Naipaul was; he encounters West Indians in London and does not like them very much: another echo from Naipaul’s past.
There is sex — shameful, unsatisfying, with the hint of ejaculatio praecox, the hair-trigger issue that occurs in many a Naipaul narrative. Repulsion plays a part in every sexual encounter that Naipaul describes: he finds disgust where you least expect it, not just in “her plucked eyebrows, her depilated but slightly bristly legs”, but in her perfume, too. “Willie had never known perfume like that, that mingled smell of excrement and sweat.” Willie falls in love with Ana, a Portuguese woman from an unnamed African country. Evidence suggests that the country is Mozambique; Willie emigrates.
There is more sex. An earlier, jollier Naipaul might have found a place to indulge himself in the incongruity of a novel about a sexual failure named Willie. But this is all serious stuff. Sexual attraction and frustration are important themes, as is sexual knowledge and the lack of it. Here is Willie bemoaning his ignorance in Africa: “We are all born with sexual impulses, but we are not all born with sexual skill and there are no schools where we can be trained. People like me have to fumble and stumble.”
At last Willie meets Graça. At the age of 33 he discovers passion. Willie is triumphant. But Graça is married. Never mind, so is Willie. There is a wonderful, if improbable, exchange with his wife: “Ana said to me one day, ‘People are talking about you and Graça. You know that, don’t you?’ I said, ‘It’s true.’ She said, ‘You can’t talk to me like this, Willie.’ I said, ‘I wish you could be in the room when we make love. Then you would understand.'”
It is, of course, downhill for Willie after that. He injures his leg and decides to leave Africa. He catches up with his sister. He is 41. Somehow all these years have passed and great events have taken place; but it is a time warp. The novel ends nowhere. It is about nothing, just an assortment of Naipaul situations and remarks. Anyone who does not know his work will find it unbelievable, badly written, wilful and weird. I do, too, but it is calculatedly weird and clumsy.
Every unsatisfactory bit of the book is deliberate — the odd structure, the implausible situations, the stilted dialogue, the harsh tone, the apparent clichés. You read sentences in this narrative such as “The possibilities were dizzying”, or “Perfume counter. Debenhams: the words intoxicated Willie”, and you think Naipaul is parodying bad writing, but no, this is his response to so-called fine writing; the prose of someone such as John Updike, which he sees as empty, just “golden sentences”.
Earlier in his career Half a Life would have been a comedy. But Naipaul’s writing has not raised a smile since the stories in A Flag on the Island.
About 20 years ago an angry unpublished author typed out Jerzy Kosinski’s prize-winning novel Steps, retitled it, and submitted it to Kosinski’s publisher, who turned it down as unpublishable. Without Naipaul’s name on it, Half a Life would be turned down in a flash. With his name on it, of course, its trajectory is certain: great reviews, poor sales and a literary prize.