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.