No Magic In These Seeds

When a writer is constantly in the news, not so much for his work as for his controversial statements or life, the man could easily overshadow the writer. But in V.S. Naipaul’s case, writer and man have kept pace with each other. He himself, however, does not separate the two. "Man and writer were the same person," he says in The Enigma of Arrival. Few writers have worked out this theory in fiction as persistently as Naipaul has, though he denies that he brings himself into his novel. According to him, he only uses an autobiographical frame and tries "to make fiction as close to life as possible". One must admit that Naipaul has been able to make this combination work. His previous novel, Half a Life, in which the life of Willie Somerset Chandran closely paralleled Naipaul’s own, won many admirers and it was hoped that Naipaul would eventually give readers the other half of that life. Which he has done in Magic Seeds, a novel that begins with Willie living in Berlin in "a temporary half and half way". (The words ‘half’ and ‘semi’ are almost a leitmotif in this novel). But his life takes a completely different turn when he decides to go to India and join Kandapalli’s revolutionary group—this, oddly enough, not out of his own conviction, but because his sister Sarojini tells him to do so. "We all have wars to go to," she says. More than half the novel is about Willie’s life among the revolutionaries.

Willie discovers, soon after his arrival, that he is on the wrong side, with Kandapalli’s enemies! "Mistakes can occur," is Sarojini’s response to his letter and Willie, typically, decides to stay with the group. He becomes a courier, travels with a companion through forests and villages, is later promoted to a road- and bridge-destroying squad, watches men being killed, and kills a man himself. Finally, and this is the only decision that he takes, he surrenders and goes to jail, where he lives for a few years before getting a special amnesty (due to his being a writer!) with Sarojini’s help. Such are the bare facts of Willie’s ‘revolutionary’ story.

One has no right to ask an author about the choice of a theme, setting or his characters. But curiosity remains: why did Naipaul bring Willie into the People’s War movement in Andhra Pradesh? One possibility is that he saw in it "a classic story of the revolution"—words that surface repeatedly in the novel. Naipaul has always been obsessed with getting material for his novels; for this one he visited India to collect information about the movement, the details of which are meticulously reported in the novel. Nevertheless, despite many interesting passages and occasional flashes of insight, it remains a one-dimensional bleak picture of misery, anger and hopelessness. There is another problem as well, to which a bizarre statement by a revolutionary gives a clue. "I wished to see how the poor lived," he says and therefore arranged to see the poor, "like a tourist". Is this how Naipaul himself approached his mission? And is this why the facts collected and the stories heard remain untransformed, as if the writer’s imagination refused to infuse life into them and recreate them? We are told that after he decided to come to India, "a new kind of emotional life" came to Willie. But the reader never gets the sense of this emotional life. Willie goes mechanically through the motions of a revolutionary’s life, which comes to us like a piece of factual reporting. Worse, the attempts at evoking emotion through references to ‘the poor’ and their misery—"it makes you want to cry" is a favourite line—are awkward and embarrassingly mawkish. Naipaul has spoken favourably of degrees of removal from direct involvement, but here the removal is so great that it distances even the reader. Willie seems more like a traveller, observing, recording, but concerned most of all with his own feelings, his reactions and responses. Many times, the information remains unwoven into the narrative and is left awkwardly dangling. And at times it is shockingly inept, as when the scene of the killing of a traitor is preceded by some facts about how much bidi workers earn. Even a novice would not be forgiven this! How then does one explain this clumsiness in a man who has been called "the greatest living writer of English prose"? And what can one say about the amateurishness of the stilted conversation between Sarojini and Willie about Gandhi? It seems to be addressed to someone who knows nothing about Gandhi; but, surely, the two who are speaking to each other know the basic facts about him!

Naipaul’s impatience with the traditional form of the novel has led him to reshape it with varying degrees of success. The Enigma of Arrival, for example, was an almost-perfect blend of honest self-reflection and elegance of style. Magic Seeds, unfortunately, is no more than disparate experiences and ideas offered to the reader in the form of a novel. Is this the inevitable outcome of an author reaching a stature which makes it impossible for anyone to edit his work? The tragic loneliness of success? Or a casualness that comes from the confidence that there is an audience waiting? Whatever the reasons, the novel, sadly, conveys a sense of a writer slipping from the exacting standards he had set for himself.

The second part of the novel, about Willie’s life in London, where, according to the amnesty deal he is to stay "now and forever", is tedious, his life even more passive and almost parasitic. He lives with his lawyer, Roger, and has a bloodless affair with his wife. His main role, however, is of a listener of Roger’s stories. Roger is obviously the author’s mouthpiece, because many of Roger’s views have been expressed by Naipaul in recent interviews. One must admit that, outrageous though Naipaul’s comments are, there is often a grain of truth in them. And you have to admire a man who refuses to bow to the god of political correctness. One could agree, for example, with his statements on the misuse of welfare benefits. But when he—or rather Roger—speaks of ‘common’ women having children (he calls it ‘littering’) by various fathers only to get benefits, when he refers to the working class as ‘common’, ‘plebeian’ and even ‘trash’, the viciousness of the statements makes one recoil instinctively. The same scorn and contempt is heaped on women as well. "Women’s autobiographies are boastful chronicles of screwing," Roger says. Really? Willie is not the only link between the two parts of the novel; there is also the same "solace of hate" available to the characters. A reader expects a novel to have at least one character to sympathise or identify with. Passive Willie or vicious Roger—whom do we choose? An author’s clarity of vision, which can take us beyond hypocrisy, needs also an understanding of human possibilities, human frailty and, above all, compassion.

It is hard to believe that the man who wrote books like A House for Mr Biswas or The Enigma of Arrival has written this novel. Somewhere along the way, an honest, creative self-exploration turned into barren, narcissistic self-absorption. One remembers Jack in The Enigma of Arrival who "had created his own life, his own world, his own continent", something Willie Chandran finds impossible, because, "it is the one thing I have worked at all my life, not being at home anywhere". This statement could as well apply to Naipaul’s writing, which seems to be unable to get out of the rut of exile and homelessness, unable to move on. In The Enigma of Arrival, we read that "Jack had sensed that life and man were the true mysteries". Magic Seeds has no mystery, no magic either. Naipaul’s criticism of Dickens was that he died of self-parody, words that come perilously close to what Naipaul is doing to himself.

Speaking of his affair with Marian, the ‘plebeian’ woman, Roger says that without the intensity that came from their occasional meetings, Marian became ‘banal’. Can one then, using the same yardstick of intensity, label Magic Seeds banal?