Magic Seeds
by V.S. Naipaul
Knopf. 288 pp. $25.00

In his Nobel Prize lecture in 2001, V.S. Naipaul announced that he had reached the twilight of his literary career. There was, he claimed, very little that he—or any novelist for that matter—had left to write. “I have no faith in the survival of the novel,” he remarked more recently. “The world has changed, and people do not have the time to give that a book requires.”

The story of the young Naipaul, who left the obscure Indian community in Trinidad where he was born in 1932 to study English literature on a government scholarship at Oxford, is by now well known. Fired with the will to publish, Naipaul confined himself for two years to an attic in London where he wrote his first comic masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961; two minor novels, The Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street, had preceded it). Since then, splitting his work between fiction and non-fiction, he has produced at least two more outstanding novels, In a Free State (1971) and A Bend in the River (1979), along with a series of penetrating first-hand investigations into subjects as diverse as the rise of Islamic states to a tour of the American South.

In his novels Naipaul has concentrated on the themes of exile, alienation, and the decay of civilizations. At a glance he appears to be the heir of Conrad, Kipling, and Graham Greene, and, among Indian writers, R.K. Narayan. But Naipaul defies categories and precursors alike. Unaffiliated with any academic institution (something rare among writers today), he instinctively rejects the idea of fiction-writing as a craft that can be taught. And yet his novels have come to define what academics mean by “post-colonial”—an increasingly vast swath of contemporary literature that he has furnished, paradoxically, with some of its most atypical and unsettling exemplars. Naipaul offers no excuses for the inhabitants of the dark corners of the world with which his work is concerned; he depicts them uncompromisingly, in all of their backwardness, fashioning each book into a neatly packaged nightmare for any politically correct literary taxonomist.

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Magic Seeds, his latest novel, is no exception. The book traces the fate of Willie Chadran, the hapless anti-hero of Naipaul's 2001 novel, Half a Life. In that earlier work—the two books can be read independently—Willie, the son of a Brahmin father and a low-caste mother who married in a fit of Gandhian idealism, leaves his native India for a university education in 195 0's London. There he finds himself adrift against the backdrop of a bewildering bohemia. His college friend, Percy Cato, marshals him to the beat of the sexual revolution, but his encounters both with Percy's girlfriend and with prostitutes are fumbling failures, reminiscent of the experiences of Ralph Singh in Naipaul's 1967 London novel, The Mimic Men:

We seek sex and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed. The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us. It is so whenever, moving out of ourselves, we look for extensions of ourselves. It is with cities as it is with sex. We seek the physical city and find only a conglomeration of private cells.

One of the “private cells” Willie manages to befriend in Half a Life is Roger, a young lawyer who helps him publish a modest collection of stories. Although the book does not receive much attention, it finds its way into the hands of a Portuguese woman, Ana, who tracks down its author. Willie marries Ana and follows her back to her estate in East Africa, where he listlessly spends the next eighteen years shooting guns and perfecting his sexual technique with African women. At the end of Half a Life, Willie has abandoned Ana and Africa to join his sister Sarojini, who has struck an “international marriage” of her own with a documentary filmmaker in Berlin.

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Taking up where Half a Life leaves off, Magic Seeds opens in a German café, where Sarojini chastises her forty-one-year-old brother for not having made more of his life. For inspiration, she encourages him to read Gandhi (the man indirectly responsible for their parents' disastrous marriage and always a source of suspicion in Naipaul). She also enchants Willie with her own “complete intellectual system” and trite Maoist maxims (“Sometimes in a storm beautiful old trees are uprooted”). Without much ado, he agrees to join a fledgling guerrilla war against landowners back in India. The fight is being led by a radical leader named Kandapalli—“the most important man in the world”—who has refined the caste revolution by taking a bottom-up approach: “Revolution was to come from below, from the village, from the people. There was to be no place in this movement for middle-class masqueraders.”¹

And so Willie goes off to his little war. In India he meets his contact, Joseph, a shady university professor, who dispatches him to a commune in the jungle. But before long, in the company of his new comrades, he realizes he has made a grave mistake. He is among the “trousers people”—the exact type of middle-class romantics he had sought to avoid. This cast of incompetent ideologues is depicted by Naipaul as pitilessly as anything in Evelyn Waugh. One of them has joined the revolution because he is a cuckold; another simply because he is small; another, aptly named Einstein, because he failed in his career as a mathematician.

Writing despondent letters to Sarojini, who regretfully confirms that he is “among psychopaths,” Willie eventually succumbs to the revolutionaries' “philosophy of murder” and obeys an order to kill a landowner, which lands him in jail. There he has the further misfortune of being surrounded by Maoist and Leninist texts he finds too tedious to read.

Although these chapters include some of the book's most riveting prose, Naipaul only loosely sketches the plot of the India section—we are never actually sure where we are, or how much time has passed. As if to abandon any pretense of realism, he finally has Willie rescued by a remote figure from his past—the lawyer Roger—who extricates him from prison on the basis of his long-ago book of stories. “It says here you were a pioneer of Indian writing,” explains Willie's warden upon releasing him.

The last third of Magic Seeds is occupied by Willie's return to London, where he stays with Roger at his house in St. John's Wood and soon makes a daily habit of sleeping with Roger's wife, Perdita (whom he had desired 30 years earlier). In the penultimate chapter, Roger himself recounts, in monologue form, an affair he has had with Marian, an amateur artist, who once helped take care of his aging father and with whom he was able to cultivate, to the point of perversion, his sexual fetish for the lower classes.

Sex takes on an even more perverted, if baffling, role at the end of the book, when Willie and Roger attend a wedding for the son of an old friend, a West African diplomat named Marcus whose self-professed goal in life has been to produce a completely white grandchild and show him off in public; during the wedding ceremony, one of Marcus's two grandchildren—whether black or white is unclear—farts and draws suspicion along racial lines from the assembled guests.

One thing is clear: sex, which has nearly always been an unfulfilling, isolating experience in Naipaul, takes on in Magic Seeds a grand if rather blunt metaphoric significance. Roger's sexual lethargy signals the decline of English gentry, Marcus's “recessive” racial impulse suggests the impending immigrant ascendancy. Whereas, for Willie, sex has always served as a means of collapsing back into himself, for Roger and Marcus it functions to eradicate history. The “magic seeds” of the novel are, in fact, precisely these shortcuts—receptacles of misplaced hopes, whether in the form of transcendental sex, a delusional war, or amateur art.

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Naipaul has said that plot can be a “burden” for the contemporary novel—that sometimes the best an author can hope for is to leave a few vivid images in the reader's mind. In Magic Seeds, he takes this philosophy very far—perhaps too far. We are left with plenty of images, but at the end of the book Willie Chandran remains as frustratingly overshadowed by Naipaul's own voice as when we began. The negligently crafted plot, combined with that looming voice, undercuts any deep involvement on the part of the reader in Willie's failure to determine his own character, and makes him a considerably less interesting one to watch than many an earlier Naipaul protagonist. “The world is what it is,” Naipaul has written elsewhere; “men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” Magic Seeds is the faithful but, finally, unmoving story of such a nothing.

Still, despite its faults, the book remains noteworthy for its masterful prose alone—and for those indelible images. Transcribing Willie's thoughts, Naipaul ends on a wonderful note, characteristically coupling implacable skepticism with his own brand of throat-catching sympathy: “It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unraveling. But I can't write to Sarojini about that.”

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¹ Naipaul may be loosely basing Kandapalli on Charu Mazumdar, a Maoist fanatic who instigated the 1970's Naxalite uprisings in Andra Pradesh.

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