NAIPAUL IS always brilliant, but the term probably has the wrong connotation here – the only scintillation is of flints in a country road, momentary tears, sad Caribbean sunlight. The tone of the book is reminiscent, elegiac. It is dedicated to the memory of Naipaul’s brother Shiva, who died in 1985, and it ends with a memory of the death of a sister equally beloved.
The theme, as it emerges at the end of the book, is ‘life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men, the grief and the glory.’ The book is called ‘a novel in five sections,’ but it reads like an autobiographical meditation, not a novel at all.
As I know that a violin sonata cannot properly be called a symphony, I doubt whether a book of this kind ought to be called a novel. But everybody except the Americans is becoming increasingly vague as to what a novel is. The Booker fiction prize was a few years ago given to Schindler’s Ark, which was a biography. Julian Barnes’s excellent Flaubert’s Parrot was presented in English as a novel, but Le Perroquet de Flaubert won its Parisian prize in the belles lettres category.
I worry about this melting of categorical barriers. A novel, as Flaubert himself said, is a damnably difficult machine to construct. It has a diversity of characters, a plot, a denouement. It is, above all, an imaginative construct, a triumph or failure of artifice.
There is nothing of artifice about Naipaul’s new book. The protagonist-narrator does not give himself a name, though there is an intimation that his first name begins with a V. The tribulations of the writer whose soul is bared are all Vidia’s, from Trinidad to Europe and back again. If this is not autobiography, it is because it admits more poetry, more descriptive detail, indeed more soul-baring than we expect in a mere bundle of memoirs. Autobiography is not meant to be art, though it can be high craft. This book, whatever we call it, is art of an exceptional order, but it does not admit the novelist’s artifice.
The opening section presents the writer-narrator in a village not far from Stonehenge. He is alienated, a foreigner,
A man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in a cottage of a half neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I, a further oddity in its ground. I felt unanchored and strange.
His imagination anchors itself to Jack, a very ordinary man living in a farm-workers cottage, tending a garden ‘surrounded by ruins, reminders of vanished lives,’ himself a remnant of the past.
He likes to think of Jack as an earth-rooted solidity, a precious symbol because of the West Indian’s own insecure past – ‘peasant India, colonial Trinidad’ – and the rootless insecurity of his present writer’s existence. But, with Jack’s death, he sees him not as a symbolic remnant, but as one who had built his own tenuous life in silence and with courage: ‘All around him was ruin, and all around, in a deeper way, was change, and a reminder of the brevity of the cycles of growth and creation.’
Just before dying, on Christmas Eve, Jack had risen from his bed and taken his last beer in the village pub, asserting, ‘at the very end, the primacy not of what was beyond life, but life itself.’ Jack’s widow becomes a townswoman, the new weapons are tested on Salisbury Plain, modern diary technology supervenes on the old way, Jack is gone but has to be commemorated. This is the duty of a middle-aged writer from Trinidad.
This first section, and the third and fourth, are a remarkable testimony to Naipaul’s capacity for expressing the spirit of place. Wiltshire yields to his eye as does India, Argentina or Africa. Nobody has done better what he does here – describing meadows, villagers, sycamores, ‘the whitening hedge against which the rabbits fed.’ But there is a strangeness – the sharp eye is not that of the native. The anonymous writer who is really Naipaul is full of ‘the rawness of response – every excursion into a new part of the country was for me like a tearing at an old scab.’
In his second section, ‘The Journey,’ we learn the explanation of the title of his book. He comes across a reproduction of a painting by Chirico, reproduced on the dustcover and ponders the meaning of its name – ‘The Enigma of Arrival’. It was to suggest a story with that title, filling out in words what Chirico intimates with a few brushstrokes – ‘a sunlit sea journey ending in a dangerous classical city.’ The story was not written but the title has found its target. The dreamlike quality of Chirico’s picture is matched by the author’s own recurring nightmare – an explosion in the head which throws him into a degraded posture before strangers. It is the moment of arrival, and the hope perverted to panic is part of the enigma.
The writer’s journeys follow Naipaul’s own routes – the expectations and shocks of many arrivals – but there is a double homing: to the Wiltshire village where Jack toiled and died, and to the site of cremation in Trinidad where his sister’s body was consumed in Hindu ceremonies. The enigma of arrival is balanced by his final section title – ‘The Ceremony of Farewell.’ He discovers the purpose of writing this book – ‘Death and the way of handling it – that was the motif of the story of Jack.’ The sacred Hindu world vanishes, as does the Druid world of Stonehenge, and the memory of dead empires blurred:
Every generation now was to take us further away from those sanctities. But we remade the world for ourselves; every generation does that, as we found when we came together for the death of this sister and felt the need to honour and remember. It forced us to look on death.
The book moves towards reconciliation, the glory inseparable from the grief. And so Naipaul ends as he began – with Jack.
If Naipaul wishes us to accept his book as a novel we will. The description at least imposes a sense of distance and impersonality and, most of all, a pattern. If it is a novel, it is one lacking in the trivial facetiousness and the fleshly sensationalism of the genre as we meet it these days. It has great dignity, compassion and candour. It is written with the expected beauty of style. It is philosophical and yet it smells of the earth. It does the opposite of what is increasingly being seen as the aim of the novelist (who, said Auden, must be dirty with the dirty). Instead of diminishing life Naipaul ennobles it.
Observer, 15 March 1987
Review of The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul (New York: Viking, 1987)