Review by Nicholas Laughlin
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| Half a Life, by V.S. Naipaul Review by Nicholas Laughlin |
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[Published in Caribbean Beat, November/December 2001]
Half a Life by V.S. Naipaul Picador 214 pp. ISBN 0-330-485-16-4 Was it just three years ago that Sir Vidia proclaimed, “I’d have a lot of trouble writing straight fiction now, because I’ve done my fiction”? Expect no more novels from me, he seemed to be saying. Let us rejoice: he’s changed his mind. Half a Life takes up the themes we think of as classically Naipaulian: exile, alienation, the restless anxiety these provoke. The problem of human existence, for Naipaul, is not the ordeal of being so much as that of becoming, the ceaseless reinvention of the self demanded by the impermanent world. He has studied this problem with unflagging interest through fiction, travel writing, autobiography; here his subject is Willie Chandran, born into volatile India of the independence movement. Twenty years old, despising his father and wanting only to leave his home, Willie journeys to post-war London. He tries to assemble some kind of life from the ill-fitting fragments of what he expects, what he finds, and what is expected of him. He writes scripts for the BBC and eventually publishes a book, waiting for the illumination he believes will reveal his future path. Then he meets Ana, a young woman from Portuguese East Africa. He takes her unquestioning acceptance as the awaited sign; they marry and emigrate to Ana’s homeland. “I must not unpack. I must never behave as though I am staying,” is Willie’s first thought. He stays for eighteen years, idle, always a stranger, finding something like fulfillment only briefly in an affair with a married woman. After a minor accident one day he wakes in a hospital bed. He is forty-one. He tells Ana he’s decided to divorce her and leave Africa, then finds his way to his semi-estranged sister in Germany. He leaves himself, abruptly, with nothing, nowhere. Naipaul’s prose has never been calmer, plainer, more purposeful, consistently counterpointing the characters’ panic and dread. His narrative control has never been more masterful. If Half a Life is an ultimately unsatisfying novel this quality seems perfectly deliberate, the only feeling reaction to Willie’s omissive life. The negative echoes of Naipaul’s own past in this story are striking: the crucial paternal relationship, the first disappointing experience of England, the BBC, the book of stories, the implacable restlessness. Perhaps this is why Half a Life is at once so moving and so disconcerting. It’s as if Naipaul were saying, There, but for the grace of myself, go I. |
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