The center does not hold.

Magic Seeds

V. S. Naipaul 

Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 280 pp.

This is V.S. Naipaul's fourteenth novel, and likely to be his last. He says he no longer has sufficient energy for novel writing (he is now seventy-two), and he thinks that the novel itself as a form of literary expression is "almost over. The world has changed and people do not have the time to give that a book requires."

This is chutzpah beyond the norm even for Nobel laureates (Naipaul was awarded the literature prize in 2001). Of course, Naipaul has never been shy about making sweeping and apparently arrogant public pronouncements; that is part of why he is such a fascinating figure. If you want to be told, in elegantly understated and venomously precise prose, that Islam produces cultural amnesia, or that Black Africa has and is likely to continue to have only a parasitic and self-forgetful literature, or that India is a country of fanatics and fools, then Naipaul is your man. And there certainly are elements in Magic Seeds that suggest his seriousness about the connection between the end of his own literary work and the end of the novel itself. Always a pessimist and sometimes a satirist of Swiftian intensity, he has now, it seems, become a writer who thinks that his last bastion of hope--the very position of the writer, from which observation, imagination, and precise formulation are possible--has failed him. But to understand this a little background is necessary.

Naipaul was born in 1932 to a Hindu family in Trinidad. This made him, he thinks, twice displaced, doubly colonized: first by the colonization of India, which had cut Hindus off from their cultural roots; and second by the British Empire's economic needs, which had removed his Indian forebears to Trinidad, there to work the cane plantations. In such a situation, Hinduism and the literature of India could be no more than relics, pottery shards from a vessel broken beyond repair. The literature and culture of Europe were also, because of distance and otherness, largely incomprehensible and inaccessible. Naipaul has provided many affecting and perceptive passages about the experience of reading the novels of high European culture. What could it mean to read Madame Bovary or Great Expectations or The Idiot as a Trinidadian Hindu youth immediately after the second great war of the twentieth century, a war that itself occurred for the most part offstage, as ominous rumblings from the center of a world to which Trinidad existed only as periphery?

This metaphor of center and periphery is central to Naipaul's biographical imaginings. As a very young man he won a scholarship to Oxford, which permitted him, as he saw it, to move inward, from Trinidad at the world's edges, to its center: Oxford first, and later London; and then, as he became increasingly famous as a writer, outward again to Africa, India, South America, and even the United States. Wherever he went, though, he went as observer and critic writing from the center of what he has sometimes called "the universal civilization."

Naipaul understood this universal civilization, radiating from London, to be the giver of great gifts, gifts unparalleled in history and unavailable elsewhere. First among these gifts is that of a position in the world from which it makes sense to think new thoughts and write new words. Almost equally important is this civilization's provision of all the apparatus necessary to make the writer's vocation not only an idea but also a reality: publishers, bookstores, journals of criticism and comment, and above all readers.

The young Naipaul grasped the gift of writing with passion and pride. He has now, after almost fifty years, produced a large and varied body of work that includes, in this reviewer's judgment, some of the best English prose written in the twentieth century. Naipaul's themes and obsessions--colonialism, cultural amnesia and mimicry, the meaning of violence and revolution, the ambiguities of sex, the prevalence of stupidity--depict the blood-sodden second half of the twentieth century as it appeared to a man drawn in from the periphery to the center. Naipaul became a fervent (though nuanced) apologist for that center's civilization, and has spent much of his life wandering and criticizing the periphery, only, finally, to despair (if Magic Seeds does turn out to be the end of his career as a novelist) even of the value and virtue of the center.

In 1992, Naipaul gave a lecture in New York City titled "Our Universal Civilization." It is a careful, precise, and understated essay in which some astonishing claims are made. Naipaul says that he arrived at the idea of the universal civilization in response to his travels and observations of Islamic countries in the late 1970s. (The book that issued from those travels was Among the Believers [1981]; a report on later travels in the same parts of the world was published in 1998 as Beyond Belief; both are still in print and eminently worth reading; they are also among the most critical works written, pre- or post-9/11, on resurgent Islam.) Islamic faith is, he says, a memory killer, an eraser or expunger of civilization and cultural depth. And when these are erased, the world closes in, literature becomes impossible, and all that is left is "philosophical hysteria," a shriek from a "half-naked, betel-chewing pessimist ... upon the banks of [a] tropical river, on the edge of still and immense forests; a man angry, powerless, empty-handed, with a cry of bitter discontent on his lips." (Naipaul is here approvingly quoting Conrad, one of his acknowledged masters, another observer from the periphery who had been given the gift of English and Englishness.)

Opposed to Islamic fundamentalism is the universal civilization of the West, or so thought Naipaul in 1992. This, he wrote then, is "the civilization, first of all, which gave me the idea of the writing vocation .... To be a writer, you need to start with a certain kind of sensibility. This sensibility itself is created or given direction by an intellectual atmosphere." The sensibility he means is one to which precision, energy, the individual viewpoint, and a depth of cultural and literary memory are essential. It is within the ambience of this sensibility, this intellectual atmosphere, that all Naipaul's writing lives and moves and has its being, from the early compassionately comic writing in novels such as The Mystic Masseur (1957) and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), to The Enigma of Arrival (1987), perhaps the high point of his literary output and certainly among the twentieth century's masterpieces. But the sensibility and the atmosphere are largely gone from Magic Seeds, and it seems that Naipaul no longer thinks them possible.

Magic Seeds is the sequel to Half a Life (2001). Together, the two novels tell the story of Willie Chandran, son of a disastrous, mixed-caste Indian marriage who leaves India for England in the 1950s (as Naipaul left Trinidad for England at the same time). In London, Willie is adrift: he wants to be a writer and a lover of women but has no idea what either requires or might mean. He is baffled by the intricacies of the English social world, secure only in his knowledge that he does not know. Nonetheless, he begins to succeed after a fashion: he publishes a book of short stories, tepidly written and badly reviewed; he learns how to seduce women and imagines loving some of them; and he marries Ana, a woman from East Africa. Ana is white, and when he goes with her to Africa he is once again lost, doubly uprooted, now at two removes from his native language and habits. He has sex with many women; he observes the disintegration of the old, white, colonial order along with the disintegration of his marriage; and at forty-one, after eighteen years in Africa, he asks for a divorce from Ana, saying he has for all these years been living her life rather than his. And there the first book, Half a Life, ends.

The new book, Magic Seeds, opens with Willie in Berlin, acutely aware that he does not know how to make or discover his own life. His sister Sarojini persuades him that he will only succeed in finding such a life if he participates in an armed and violent revolution brewing somewhere in India. There, his sister says, he'll find the real world, not the simplified life of the prosperous West in which life's meaning has been reduced to marking time with meals and sex and shopping until death comes. And so Willie goes to India. But when he gets there he enters a world in which nothing is ever clearly understood or directly said. He moves uncomprehendingly from one revolutionary group to another; he sees and participates in various kinds of violence; he betrays and is betrayed, without drama; he kills; and all of it is depicted as accidental, meaningless, as coldly repetitive as the peacock's cry at dawn (a recurrent and powerful image in the book). All the participants in the action, including Willie, are automatons, without understanding or memory. The first half of Magic Seeds ends with Willie in an Indian prison, perhaps (but perhaps not) about to be tried for murder.

He is released, on condition that he leave India for good, and goes back to England. But England is no better than or different from Africa and India. Willie goes to live with his one-time friend, Roger, and almost at once begins an affair with Perdita, Roger's wife. Anal sex figures largely; each partner is an object for the other, and the sexual acts described are depicted as so emotionally distant and physically compulsive that they disgust. Naipaul intends this, but he also takes pleasure in producing the effect, or at least gives the impression of doing so, and the result is both unpleasant and depressing.

Naipaul's treatment of the sexual habits of the English serves as synecdoche for the vision of contemporary England. This is an England in which the remnants of the class system produce blindly imitative behavior. Perdita decorates her home in slavish imitation of the tricks of taste she's seen in upperclass houses, with no idea about the beauty or ugliness of the effect. People play their roles with no sense of the narrative to which they belong--and indeed there is no narrative. Everyone walks in darkness, with habits that have become fetishes. The novel's last scene shows this beautifully, and horribly. It is an emblematic wedding: a mixed-race man, son of a West Indian diplomat and a white woman, is marrying a "pure-white aristocratic lady" by whom he already has a child "as white as white can be." This wedding fulfills the sole ambition of the groom's diplomat father, which is "to have sex only with white women and then one day to have a white grandchild." But this is not all. The bride's family, once rich in a country-estate kind of way, has come down in the world, and the wedding takes place on the grounds of their once-grand family house, now a ruined shell. The guests don't mind, for they have "been confused for the last hundred years," and are unlikely to be able to tell the difference between a ruined country house and a picturesque setting for a wedding. The wedding goes off, and the celebrations that follow include music used on Dutch slave plantations to "reconcile the slaves to Monday morning." Willie and his friend leave, and the book ends with Willie having restless dreams and waking up with the idea that "it's wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unraveling."

This is not a subtle book, even though some of its parts preserve Naipaul's old compressed precision in which the very compression of the prose signals endless complexities. For the most part, though, Naipaul does not permit his readers any ambiguities or any doubt as to the depth of his despair. And as if things were not quite obvious enough, the novel opens with a 237-word sentence, beautifully paced and pitched, made to be read aloud, in which Naipaul tells his readers (what they will not yet understand, not yet having read the book) that his book's protagonist has had a life in which he does nothing other than move from "one sealed chamber of the spirit to another." For Naipaul, now, there are only sealed chambers in which damaged slaves live out their lives in one attempt after another to drug themselves into making Monday bearable. The universal civilization, having caused everyone at the periphery to forget who they are and to enter sealed chambers from which there is no exit, has now, in Naipaul's view, consumed itself as well. And if he is right about that, there is now nowhere for the writer to stand; and that is why he thinks that he must stop writing novels.

This is the dyspeptic apocalypticism of an old man, dark and bitter. In a poem, "Hear Me," published shortly before he died last year, Czeslaw Milosz, another old man, prayed for protection against the day "when I am ready at last to bow down to nothingness and call life on earth a devil's vaudeville." Naipaul, one of our greatest writers, has bowed down in precisely this way, and that is sad. He has not lost his skill. Magic Seeds has many passages of beauty. But he has lost, it seems, compassion and humor, and his view of human beings and their doings is now not much different from Gulliver's (and Swift's) at the end of his travels. Gulliver preferred the company of horses to that of men, and some such position is where unleavened satire always ends. Novels cannot easily be written from such a position, and this one comes close to dissolving in its own acids.

Paul J. Griffiths is Schmitt Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His most recent book is Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity (Brazos Press).