The enigma of arrival.

The Enigma of Arrival, A Novel

by V. S. Naipaul (Random, 354 pp., $17.95)

HISTORY AND the discontinuities of history lie heavily on the landscape in this book. Set in a rich Wiltshire farming valley, only walking distance from Salisbury Plain with its barrows and tumuli and remains of Stonehenge, the story begins with long observations of the local flora, which are as branching and organic as the vegetal life they describe. Little by little, and layer by layer, the accumulated natural and human effects on the land emerge, as do--even more slowly --the lives of the current inhabitants. At first, all this seems a mere evocation of sentimental and literary associations. But soon we are led by the narrator past surface illusions into a profound experience of modernity.

Though subtitled "A Novel,' the narrator's story is to all appearances a memoir of Naipaul's life. He lives for ten years in a rented Wiltshire cottage, but was born in Trinidad of an Indian family. In spite of the twenty years he had previously spent in England, he arrives in Wiltshire a man lost, cut off from his background, and somewhat disoriented by the land in which he had made his life.

Only an author of Naipaul's mastery could craft so moving and so simply beautiful a "novel' out of such apparently humble materials. The traditional trappings of plot, development of characters, and so forth are for the most part absent. How the story unfolds is not easy to explain. More than a linear unfolding, it amounts to a deepening and powerful seeing, with love and a kind of piety, of the time and country in which the narrator has lived.

In the quiet of Wiltshire, which he initially perceives in terms as traditionally bucolic as a painting by Constable, he begins to reflect on his relationship to England. He finds among the books of the former tenant some art reproductions and is suddenly moved by Giorgio de Chirico's The Enigma of Arrival. The painting depicts a stylized Mediterranean scene in which two people pass one another in an otherwise empty square. The sail of a ship protrudes over the wall at the back of the square. In a flash, the narrator is given the inspiration for a novel about a man who arrives in a classical city on some mission that

would give him encounters and adventures. He would enter interiors, of houses and temples. Gradually there would come to him a feeling that he was getting nowhere; he would lose his sense of mission; he would begin to know only that he was lost. His feeling of adventure would give way to panic. He would want to escape.

This traveler makes his way back to the dock where he arrived and hopes to return home: "Only one thing is missing now. Above the cutout walls and buildings there is no mast, no sail. The antique ship has gone. The traveler has lived out his life.'

Without much explicit reference to this intuition of his predicament, Naipaul recounts his journey, as a 17-year-old would-be writer, to London in 1950. His knowledge of England then was entirely from books and he naturally misread much of what he discovered on arrival. As his career as a writer prospered, he began to explore Africa, India, and the London records of his native Trinidad, but he had not yet fully understood the shift that had occurred in England after World War II, or his relationship to it.

In his Wiltshire cottage twenty years later, he begins to notice a variety of signs of the decline of Britain. His landlord, whom he never meets directly in all this time, is the son of a once prosperous family, last of the line and content to allow the grounds of the estate to decay in order to afford to continue living there. Earning the upkeep by work or investment seems out of the question. Soon the whole place will have to be sold off and converted into a school or hospital. The help and the neighbors, Naipaul thinks initially, at least preserve some of the old authentic England of his boyhood reading. But he gradually learns that they have been as influenced by modern life as has his landlord.

Even in this leafy valley, there is no authentically traditional community left. The few farmers are not longtime inhabitants of Wiltshire, and the brief industrialization of a dairy farm--it quickly goes bankrupt--leads to further inroads on the remaining traces of pre-modern life. Many of the young people, Naipaul observes, care more for their cars than for anything else, and are essentially just as rootless as their city counterparts. To his surprise, they seem ready at any moment to move to another area and another job, confident that a series of jobs will always be open.

The book recounts the writer's growing reconciliation and contentment with this dying glory and with his separation from his origins. Oddly, the sharpest impulse toward this reconciliation comes at his sister's death. At the perfunctory Hindu funeral in Trinidad, he is moved to a profound description of how the whole family had traveled respectfully but irrevocably away from its Hindu roots to "self-awareness': "There was no ship of antique shape,' he says, "to take us back.' And with an unusual note of pietas, he captures the melancholy of modernity: "Our sacred world had vanished. Every generation was now to take us further away from those sanctities. But we remade the world for ourselves; every generation does that, as we found when we came together for the death of this sister and felt the need to honor and remember.'

This book, an expression of that paradoxical pietas, was written rapidly, soon after the sister's death, and is unique in the depth of its response and the lyrical richness of its language in re-creating the way we all live now.