The facade begins to fall apart
It is an unusual novel. Five apparently unconnected chapters without a conventional story make the subtitle, 'A novel in five sections.' And when you start going through the story, two things happen: first, the narrator and the writer seem to be one; second, some magical writing takes you through an extraordinary journey of living in a foreign land in order to develop the mind of a 'writer.' The novel has been called a 'thinly veiled autobiography'. The veil is obviously woven by braiding two parallel stories together. The fictional story is about an Edwardian Manor House involving the writer as its tenant, its employees and other people living in its valley. The autobiographical story, on the other hand, is a reflective narration of the writer's gaining an 'artistic' vision amidst the 'Enigma of Arrival.'
At the end of the story, the readers are left with a great enigma to decide whether this is fiction or a true account of Naipaul's life. It is almost as if Naipaul's writing wants to mirror the surrealistic painting from which its title is taken. Once he discovers the Giorgio de Chirico painting named 'The Enigma of the Arrival and the Afternoon' (see book-cover) in his rented house, it speaks volumes about his own journey to England:
A classical scene, Mediterranean, ancient-Roman or so I saw it. A wharf; in the background, beyond walls and gateways (like cut-outs), there is the top of the mast of an antique vessel; on an otherwise deserted street in the foreground there are two figures, both muffled, one perhaps the person who has arrived, the other perhaps a native of the port. The scene is of desolation and mystery; it speaks of the mystery of arrival.
The autobiographical novel is, therefore, a saga of Naipaul's struggle in grounding him in a distant soil as a writer of a foreign language.
It takes a great writer to weave disparate phenomena into an entertaining story. Being one of them, Naipaul paints through the power of words one after another interconnected picture of his life in an English countryside. Consider the first chapter, 'Jack's Garden'. One simply carries on reading it because wonderful panoramas of countryside flora and fauna, seasons and landscapes are blended with a vibrant presence of history. Living on a farming valley close to Stonehenge (a pre-historic monument made-up of standing stones symbolising English heritage), Naipaul cannot not but project a timeless England which inspired him to be a writer in the first place.
His story of coming to Oxford at the age of seventeen, observing people and events from moment to moment, taking notes with a pen of 'indelible' ink, and relentlessly differentiating between worthy and not-so-worthy 'materials', is now re-examined in this novel. By the time Naipaul writes this novel, he has reached a stage where he is no more anxious and uncertain about his writing career as he was at seventeen or eighteen. This writer revives with insight, honesty and humour the writer that he used to be at the beginning. In spite of the age-old trouble of being a writer ( his publisher did not like the novel he was recently writing and so he had to come back from visiting the United States to work on its improvement), experience has enabled him to talk about writing with ease and understanding. He can even say to his younger self, tongue in cheek, 'If only you knew!' Having attained the desired success, he can concede that
Man and writer were the same person. But that is a writer's greatest discovery. It took time and how much writing! to arrive at that synthesis.
But why was he at pains at the start of the journey to distance his Trinidadian identity from his entity as a writer? Searching for an answer, one cannot help noticing a troublesome aspect in the writer. It is understandable that 'colonial Trinidad' could not sustain a talented ambitious boy like Naipaul because of a lack of opportunities there, to put it simply. However, Naipaul is almost ruthless in nurturing (or being cultured, as he would say) a Western self in him to wipe out any trace of Trinidadian-ness in himself. He goes so far as to claim that a 'colonial' plantation like Trinidad cannot have a history let alone a culture of its own, especially given its multi-ethnic inhabitants! Interestingly enough, Naipaul does discover a rich history of his land of birth in nowhere else but the land of his culture, i.e., England. Though this makes him understand Trinidad much better, he keeps treating its people with sheer contempt. The irony is, even after living in his cultural home for three or four decades, he writes with a sharp sense of being an 'outsider' here. He writes about England as a stranger who belongs to the country by imbibing its culture, history and language and not through birth.
What is even more ironic is that the 'timeless England' that Naipaul wants to cherish is found to be receding in this novel. As a post-colonial writer, Naipaul writes with a full awareness of England's loss of wealth and the effect of industrialisation on its landscape. For example, the writer's Edwardian Mansion-owning landlord is portrayed as a recluse; being shorn of his 'colonial' hey-day, he creates a façade around his lonely existence, having 'preffered to be with what he knew'. However, the façade starts to fall apart under the pressure of an industrial England bereft of its empires. The industrialisation seems to affect not only the landowner but also his employees. Naipaul might have known a quintessential England through his reading but the reality is ironic and tragic part of the mansion is being sold and people are losing jobs, facing uncertainties of various sorts, getting influenced by machine and so on. The small village the writer lives in becomes a microcosm of post-Empire England; though it rejuvenates the wanderer writer through its quiet beauty and order, it fills him with profound sadness as he observes a slow break down of the order and certainty.
Stylistically speaking though, it is far away from being a tragic novel. It is written in a muted tone all along to go with the quiet landscape with its changing colours and rhythmsevery chapter's title acts as a caption to the painting that is going to be created in it through words, of course. The characters are portrayed with so much insight that it feels like one knows them from a close perspective they seem so real and the details involved in describing them are so memorable. The tone is that of an achievement as well, Naipaul being established as a kind of writer that he set out to be. In other words, there is a sense of a wheel coming full circle. In the last chapter, 'The Ceremony of Farewell', the writer takes us back to Trinidad from where his journey began. His younger sister's untimely death takes him back home to realise that…my journey, the writer's journey, the writer defined by his writing discoveries…writer and man separating at the beginning of the journey and coming together again in a second life just before the end.
Despite Naipaul's shortcoming in accepting the so-called colonials in Trinidad (and elsewhere), he renders a powerful musing on home, life and living in this novel. I would completely agree with Irving Howe of the New York Times that the novel proves Naipaul to be 'the world's writer, a master of language and perception, our sardonic blessing.'
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