At least that seems to be the lesson of the tale that Willie Chandran’s father tells him to open the novel–the story of how Willie received the middle name Somerset (after the British writer Maugham) and of how his father arrived at his disillusioned state. A Brahman destined for a good marriage and comfortable government job, Chandran pere finds himself both paralyzed by his circumstance and tugged by the great currents roiling the Indian independence movement. He decides to rebel. But he stumbles into and almost instantly regrets even this transgression: he marries a dark-skinned “backward,” in answer to Gandhi’s call to break down caste barriers. “At this moment of supreme sacrifice I fell, as if by instinct, into old ways,” he says, taking up life as a Brahman priest. The true evidence of his rebellion is his half-and-half son, stripped of heritage by the conflicting claims of mother and father.
That Willie despises his father for his deracination is made clear in a school composition that the rest of the novel–the rest of his “half life”–is spent rewriting. The allusion is literal: after he moves to London and takes up writing, one of his first stories is a revision of this first text. Naipaul, however, is not so simplistic. Willie’s story bears similarities to the author’s–the conflicted relationship with his father, the escape to the First World metropolis, the sanctuary found in writing. But there are differences, too, and in those distinctions Willie is “truer to his feelings than [he] had been with his cautious, half-hidden parables at school.” His self-exile doesn’t lead him to an enlightened vantage upon either his new surroundings or the old. He fumbles his way through bohemian immigrant London, more acted upon than acting. His character, in fact, seems soft around the edges, unfixed–when Naipaul quite clearly has the power to delineate diamond-sharp profiles.
Fortunately, these ambiguities also soften the novel itself, sanding the edges off the caustic sureties Naipaul usually trots out. After moving to an unnamed colony in Africa, Willie finds sanctuary among his own kind, a community of “second rank” Portuguese who hover between the colonial elite and the Africans themselves. The book, too, finds its center: what earlier could have been read as drift comes to seem nuance. Willie’s exile leads him to the margins of things, where he learns to appreciate being neither this nor that. Here Naipaul can relax into the kind of subtle portraiture that he often claims to have achieved in his nonfiction, but that usually shades into polemic. The locals do not come through clearly–“the African world… was everywhere, like a kind of sea”–but then again, neither does the colonial elite. What Naipaul does convey precisely and affectionately is the wavering uncertainty of a life led in between all the traditional markers of identity. These are not “half-made” people–they are fully formed characters, true to a hazy world that Naipaul sketches with grace, and so much the more true because they do not cling too tightly to reality.
