Noble-Blooded Prose

Half a Life is largely about people of mixed racial descent—half-castes, mestizos, mulattos, Euro-Africans and others—half-whites, half-browns or blacks. However physically desirable they may be, they remain socially unacceptable to the majority which prides itself on being pure-blooded. In a prefatory note, Naipaul describes his novel as "an invention. It is not exact about the countries, periods or situations it appears to describe". In fact, his story begins in India, travels to England and ends in a Portuguese colony on the west coast of Africa. The main theme in every country is miscegenation. In India, a Brahmin boy, instead of marrying a Brahmin girl approved of by his parents, takes a fancy to the plainest looking Harijan girl in his college. There is no way out because the girl’s uncle is a powerful trade union leader. His niece’s reputation has been compromised by the two being seen sitting together in the college classrooms and a cafe. They marry and lose their castes. They have a son and a daughter who find it comfortable to pose as Christians. Meanwhile, the outcaste-Brahmin, who is by now in deep trouble because of charges of corruption, seeks sanctuary in a temple, takes a vow of silence and becomes a minor godman. Amongst the celebrities who come for his darshan is Somerset Maugham. The father inserts Maugham’s first name in the middle of his son’s—Willie Somerset Chandran, the hero of Naipaul’s story.

Willie Chandran gets a scholarship to study in a London college. He is armed with a letter from Somerset Maugham. His sister marries a middle-aged German with a family of his own and moves to Berlin with her husband. She is into covering revolutions with ethnic backgrounds in Cuba and Latin American countries.

Willie Chandran has a shaky start but soon picks up a set of friends, English and coloured. He has no experience of sex and makes a hash of bedding an English girlfriend of his closest pal. He also consorts with sundry prostitutes before falling in love with Ana, the daughter of a Portuguese man and a black African. Ana is light-skinned, very lovely and understanding. When Chandran’s scholarship comes to an end, he has no job, little money and nowhere to go. He accepts Ana’s proposal to accompany her to Africa where Ana has a large house and estate left to her by her father. It is a solitary existence in the wilderness, punctuated by Sunday luncheon parties in the homes of other estate owners. Ana stays faithful to Chandran; Chandran finds living with one woman somewhat boring and picks up liaisons with Graca, wife of an estate manager. Naipaul has an inimitable way of analysing the genesis of desire in people’s expressions. He writes: "The first thing I noticed about her was her light-coloured eyes: disturbed eyes; they made me think again about her husband. And the second thing I noticed was that, for a second or two, no more, those eyes had looked at me in a way that no woman had looked at me before. I had the absolute certainty, in that second, that those eyes had taken me in not as Ana’s husband or a man of unusual origin, but as a man who had spent many hours in the warm cubicles of the places of pleasure. Sex comes to us in different ways; it alters us; and I suppose in the end we carry the nature of our experience on our faces. The moment lasted a second. It might have been fantasy, that reading of the woman’s eyes, but it was a discovery for me, something about women, something to be added to my sensual education."

Chandran throws all caution to the winds and seeks Graca with insatiable lust as if his nirvana lay in the gray-eyed woman’s thighs. "The long drive had been a strain. Graca’s need matched my own. That was new to me. Everything I had known before—the furtiveness of London, the awful provincial prostitute, the paid black girls of the places of pleasure here, who had yet satisfied me for so long, and for whom for almost a year I had felt such gratitude, and poor Ana, still in my mind the trusting girl who had sat on the settee in my college room in London and allowed herself to be kissed, Ana still so gentle and generous—over the next half-hour everything fell away, and I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence."

Half a Life has had a mixed reception in England and America. Some critics indulge in nit-picking writers who have attained eminence in the world of letters. Naipaul’s name has often been mentioned as the likely winner of the Nobel prize for literature. He has not been awarded because he writes in English and not his own language. His mother-tongue is English and he handles it better than any Englishman or woman.