Naipaul novel examines life

courtesy of KNOPF

Early into "Half a Life," Willie Chandran's father comes across his son "asleep face down, a closed copy of a school edition of 'The Vicar of Wakefield' beside him, his feet crossed, the red soles much lighter than the rest of him. There was such unhappiness and such energy there that he was overwhelmed with pity. He thought, 'I used to think that you were me, and I was worried at what I had done to you. But now I know that you are not me. What is in my head is not in yours. You are somebody else, somebody I don't know, and I worry for you because you are launched on a journey I know nothing of." Through the course of V.S. Naipaul's latest novel, it turns out that Mr. Chandran was right to worry about his son, not because Willie's journey would take him through tumultuous adventures, but because there is hardly any journey to take. Willie (named after author W. Somerset Maugham) has no grand adventures throughout the course of the novel that one would equate with Mr. Chandran's worrying. Willie embarks upon a journey to discover his full life; it is a journey toward a journey.

Willie, suffering through a problematic childhood with a father he doesn't speak to and a heritage of mixed-race, escapes from his native India and transplants himself into the heart of 1950s London. London consumes the young student with its races, lifestyles, beliefs and attitudes and also ignites his desires for the opposite sex — desires that he struggles through in a stubborn rendezvous with the lover of his friend, Percy. He mingles with the elite members of an editor's inner circle and inquires about the prostitutes who walk the decaying city streets at night. His life in London is a whirlwind of confusion and naïveté; it may seem like an average journey, but for the tormented Willie, it is a bitter fight for survival. When he falls in love and marries Ana, a young woman from Africa, and returns with her to her native land, he is consumed once again by his sociopolitical surroundings, this time spurned by the disasters of European colonialism and his sexual longing for Graca, the wife of an estate manager.

What is at stake throughout Willie's journey is not so much his freedom from himself as it is his freedom from others. Willie has a tendency to latch onto the lives of those he meets — Percy's girlfriend, Ana, even the bitter history of his own father — clinging to them like a mosquito. The relationships he has with others are not so much forms of mutualism as they are parasitism. In struggling to find his own life, Willie continues to lead a series of "half-lives," a creative mix of the journeys and destinies of himself and those around him. The half-life that Willie lives can be equated to the other divisions in life such as the division brought upon by race, colonialism and love.
Naipaul's story of a man's journey from youth into adulthood, from sexual ignorance to sexual awakening, from dependence to independence, is quiet and subdued. It is more of an internal meditation than an aesthetic, whiz-bang, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride. It is a book to be read alone, in silence. At times humorous, wistful and philosophical, "Half a Life" is about the self- betrayals we make to ourselves in living lives that are not rightfully others but at the same time are not rightfully our own. The novel is full of moments that scream out to the reader how Willie's continued semi-existence is destructive, including this wonderful passage as Willie engages in an affair with Graca on the floor of an ancient German castle that smells like fish: "I heard a voice calling. At first I couldn't be sure about it, but then I heard it as a man's voice calling from the garden. I put on my shirt and stood behind the verandah half-wall. It was an African, one of the eternal walkers on the ways, standing on the far ledge of the garden, as though fearful of the house. When he saw me he made gestures and shouted, 'There are spitting cobras in the Castle.' That explained the smell of the fish that had been with us: it was the smell of snakes." Even nature, it seems, is intent on correcting Willie's life.

Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, a prize that was correctly bestowed upon the Trinidadian author (whose early life of migration to London and a literary career mimics that of Willie Chandran) considering how deftly he handles gargantuan social and political issues in little more than 200 pages.

"I am 41," Willie says, after announcing his plans to divorce Ana. "I am tired of living your life! Now the best part of my life has gone, and I've done nothing! I've been hiding for too long." "Half a Life"is most striking in that it confronts not only the politics of colonialism and race but the politics of personal existence and individual identity as well.