Contrived plot, dull dialogue

Magic Seeds, with its didactic and utterly weird monologues, looked more like a series of essays and incidents stringed together in a paltry effort at ‘fiction’ in order to fulfill a publishing contract. Naipaul, who himself once said the novel is a dead art-form and who has complained in the past about being virtually forced to write novels for mercenary reasons, has already hinted that the work may be his last novel. But his latest book, a collection of essays and literary critique, perhaps explains what went wrong with Magic Seeds. But more than that, it is perhaps the closest he has come to a full, book-length exposition of what can now be called the ‘Naipaulian aesthetic’. But that aesthetic, as set out here, is a troubling one, as contradictory and problematic as the subjects it has been crafted to deal with.

Yet before we get into all that, we must get over the name of the new book. A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling is without a doubt the strangest of all of Naipaul’s titles. Firstly, given that the author has admitted to having no ‘homing instinct’, where is his ‘home’ and who are his ‘people’? They would appear to be neither the English, nor his Indian ancestors, nor his diasporic Trinidadian roots. Naipaul’s ‘people’ must be everyone and no one, and the title of the book is almost dramatically ironic.

But perhaps more alarmingly, I never thought I’d see the word ‘feeling’ appear in the title of a V.S. Naipaul book. Has Sir Vidia gone fluffy on us? Are we to take the now famous photograph by Jerry Bauer, with the author holding his terrified-looking cat, Augustus, seriously?

Thirty-five pages into the new book and we already have our answer.

“This will not be an easy chapter for me to do,” Naipaul writes at the start of the second essay about English novelist Anthony Powell. Immediately we can hear him sharpening the blade of that knife-cold prose to deliver some seriously well-written literary bashing.

But the bashing is not really bashing per se, but rather more like a ‘critique’ of authors who, in his estimation, are guilty of ‘not seeing’.

The first essay, entitled ‘The Worm in the Bud’, seems to want to define “seeing and feeling” in this negative, near-bashing way. Poet Derek Walcott, for Naipaul, ‘saw’ things in his first “inspired” anthology back in 1949, but then, because of the small society he lived in, was forced to become an ordinary man “in need of a job.” He ended up, Naipaul suggests, emulating other poets and being saved by the American Universities.

Sam Selvon, however, was not as fortunate, ending up in England in “desolation”. Naipaul is magnificently disdainful of his writing, summing it up thus: “He died in 1994. He left behind no solid body of work.”

How these figures relate to Naipaul’s idea of “seeing and feeling” is unclear. It is suggested that they are unable to come to their fullest potential because of the colonial society they come from. But didn’t Naipaul come from the same society? Indeed, he admits to being guilty of the same flaws as the others.

“This ignorance of mine . . . was an aspect of our history and culture. Historically, the peasantry of the Gangetic plain were a powerless people. We were ruled by tyrants.”

Yet “ignorance” does not necessarily follow from the fact of historical oppression. And what is it about the work of these authors itself that is problematic? It is one thing to say the author of The Lonely Londoners and A Brighter Sun “left behind no solid body of work”, but surely no writer leaves behind such a thing; only fate and time determine which of an author’s books – if any — will be remembered for generations to come.

We get better clues when Naipaul turns to deal with Indian writers, starting with his father Seepersad in the provocatively titled essay, ‘Looking and Not Seeing: the Indian Way’. Using the example of his grandmother living in a wretched wooden hut with her crippled brother, Naipaul observes that neither he nor his father ever wrote a single line about their lives. This, for him, “was how the more recent past was being wiped out.”

But it does not occur to Naipaul, or if it does he does not say it explicitly, that this was perhaps not really a true example of “looking but not seeing”, but rather an instance where both father and son were simply too close to painful material.

Only when Naipaul deals with Flaubert do we see concretely what he is arguing for. And it seems to come down to a matter of style; a preference for the realist passages of the second chapter of Madam Bovary as opposed to the flamboyantly overwritten historical passages of Salammbo.

When Naipaul deals with the Indian writer Nirad Chandhuri, he similarly seems to take what is essentially a disagreement about style and turn it into a symptom of a deeper clash between English and Indian culture; of the problem of “fitting one civilization to another”. Noting the lack of concrete descriptive detail in writers like Chandhuri, whom he praised in an earlier essay published in Literary Occasions back in 2004, Naipaul takes this to be an example of an inability to see things at a deeper level, like Aldous Huxley failed to notice the singularity of Mahatma Ghandi’s outlandish garb in Kanpur in 1925.

But once more the conclusion does not fit the premise. Why a lack of vision follows from a clash of two civilisations is unclear here. Naipaul needs to work out the exact mechanics of his analysis for it to have anything more than rhetorical weight. But the question is: how much more time does he have to do this?

Magic Seeds’ flat and almost non-reflexive protagonist comes to embody the idea of living life while “not seeing.” Willie Chandran, journeying through immaculately written prose, moves from “one sealed chamber of the spirit to another,” like a character acting out the half-reasoned ideas of its author.