Magic Seeds

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Summary: Seeds Appear Not to Be Sown in Naipaul's Misbegotten Novel
Review: The title of V.S. Naipaul's new novel refers to the beginning of the revolution by the guerilla fighters his main character, Wllie Chandran, meets in India. It also seems to refer to the magic seeds that can produce a raceless society through miscegenation. In either case, the story does not hold up as intriguing as it could have been, as Naipaul inexplicably makes Willie a passive observer of the life around him.

I had never read Naipaul's previous novel about Willie, "Half a Life", so I assume I am at a disadvantage to appreciate the scope of his development as presented in this book. But I have to fault the author for not providing more of a backstory to lure me into his rather exotic plot, which takes Willie to Berlin to be with his radical sister after escaping both his wife and a colonial rebellion in Africa. His sister pushes him to go to India to join the Maoist guerillas. But through a series of misadventures, he ends up with the wrong guerrillas and stays with this band of misfits for seven years. Willie becomes a revolutionary participating in crimes that terrorize the countryside the group claims to represent. The best portion of the book takes place in India, where he is paired individually with each guerilla, who in turn tells the tale of how that person became a guerilla. Through this literary technique, no matter how contrived it gets, we get completely unique pictures of India. In a moment of epiphany after turning himself to the police, Willie spends some time in jail where Naipaul's vivid descriptions of the different castes of prisoners reveals much about Indian society as a whole. Willie then goes to England, where apparently in Naipaul's previous stories, he went to school. In London, his friend Roger shows up and tells of how he met and lost his mistress. Naipaul makes this character more interesting than he should be after all that Willie has been through, but the author does evoke the predicament of a stateless person with great empathy.

Naipaul has led such a full life that I wish I could unconditionally recommend his novel for the experiences he shares. But on the whole, he has written an episodic polemic about the racial and ethnic fates we all face in spite of our best efforts to escape them. An interesting main character would have helped, as Willie here seems to serve as just the tape by which the other characters adhere together to tell their background stories. None of the stories appear to inform the character into a greater sense of self-awareness. For instance, the character's eventual views of England seem befitting of an old man ensconced in late-life irritability, rather than a man who came to realize the guerillas' base arguments were against his greater sensibilities. At the end of the story, Willie has just turned 60 and yet is still crashing at his friends' homes. Forty years seems like a ludicrous amount of time for self-exploration after college. Like Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons", this book has flourishes of great prose and some fascinating characters, but ultimately it is disappointing for the obvious disconnect of the main character from the author and the world that you would think would have been shaping both perspectives.

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Summary: The continuing story of Willie Chandran moves to war zone
Review: Though he has won the Nobel Prize in literature, V.S. Nai paul has been criticized for rewriting the same story many times in more than a dozen novels. Naipaul's fiction often revolves around characters who lurch from place to place, searching for an identity that exists only in their imaginations.

"Magic Seeds" is this kind of novel, but it also demonstrates Naipaul's keen ability to explore human action and its motivation. Here, Naipaul returns to Willie Chandran, the central character in his 2001 novel, "Half a Life." As a cultural drifter, Willie easily fits into the strand of characters populating Naipaul's work.

In "Half a Life," he moves from India to London and finally to Africa in the late 1950s, where he marries a Portuguese woman and appears to settle. "Magic Seeds" jumps ahead 18 years to Berlin, where Willie, six months after leaving his wife, now lives "in a temporary, half-and-half way" with his sister Sarojini, experiencing the listlessness that has plagued him since his youth.

Willie's problem, as he sees it, is that he has always been "someone on the outside" for whom "time passes fruitlessly by." He garners little sympathy from Sarojini, who berates him with diatribes condemning his "colonial psychosis." She views Willie as a privileged man who has deliberately avoided taking on a meaningful life as a revolutionary.

According to Sarojini, Willie should have participated in a "glorious war" of revolution as an inhabitant of both India and Africa during times of upheaval.

"We all have wars to go to," she says, arguing that fighting to help people who are slaves in their own land should be viewed as an obligation.

Spurred by her criticism and the expiration of his visa, Willie joins a revolutionary group in India, sparking the most engaging part of "Magic Seeds." Willie's placement with communist guerillas is absurd, but it provides a window into the mind-sets of revolutionaries who could easily be described as terrorists, depending upon the observer's perspective.

In the post-Sept. 11 world, Willie's experiences here are significant. At first, he sees the revolutionaries as people unwilling to let go of old ideas about home and country. But as he lives and fights with them, he notices that some guerillas experience the same displacement as Willy, finding in their futile war a sense of purpose. Others are motivated by things as inane as sexual frustration, or as significant as childhood beatings or lifelong suffering due to the machinations of the upper classes.

Eventually, Willie is captured and thrown into jail, where the prison routine provides relief from life as a jungle fighter. From there, with comical luck, Naipaul shifts Willie to England, where he restarts his disengaged life working for an architectural magazine. His guerrilla experiences have jaundiced his view of the society in which he once maintained a static existence. By novel's end, Willie progresses toward finding himself at home in the world.

"Magic Seeds" occupies an identifiable place in Naipaul's philosophy, and those who generally enjoy his work will like what's here. Readers unfamiliar with his work have much to gain as well, though Naipaul's style can feel disengaged from reality. Conversations are heavily one-sided, characters are constantly in a mode of self-reflection, and as the second half of the novel progresses, the events in "Magic Seeds" have a fleeting, episodic quality.

Despite Naipaul's heavy-handed ways, his precise art offers something revelatory about society - even if he has revealed it before.


Rating:
Summary: Engrossing work by a literary master
Review: Willie Chandran, whom we met in "Half a Life" has, after 18 years, left his wife's farm in Africa and is now living with his married sister in Berlin. Willie still has not figured out what to do with his life, although he is now in his 40s. As we have learned, Willie comes from a family that has no marketable skills and subsists on the charity of others. Willie's sister convinces him that journeying to India to aid a certain band of revolutionaries is the thing for him to do. However, he seems to find his way to the wrong band of revolutionaries. But since there seems little to choose among these groups, he sticks it out and manages to survive in the forests and in prison for seven years. Then it's back to Berlin and rather shortly to London, where he moves in with an old friend and eventually acquires, through the friend's influence, a low-level position with an architectural magazine. At the end of the novel, Willie has about managed to talk himself out of pursuing his newfound interest in becoming an architect, owing to his age, which is now 52.

Naipaul's genius is in making Willie and his cast of friends and relatives complex enough that their situations elicit our sympathy and hold our interest. Unexpectedly, the strongest chapters in the book may be the last ones, which present the friend's condemnation of the deterioration of English life owing to the disappearance of the serving classes and to the sort of irresponsible council-estate existence perpetuated by the social-welfare state.