Naipaul has quite rightly intuited that identity is one of the great questions that haunt our times, and has undertaken the novel as a pilgrimage. He has understood that many of us, born in one country of parents born in another, and moving from place to place as exiles, tourists, refugees, commuters, jetsetters and travelling salesmen, have become the inhabitants of anonymous landscapes (cyberspace, office towers, slums) in which we live often bereft of a mother tongue, of a mythology, of ancestral wisdom and of a tradition of meaningful rituals. Naipaul has realised that, under such circumstances, we can no longer attempt to obey the Delphic command, ‘Know thyself,’ before responding to the Caterpillar’s terrible greeting to Alice, ‘Who are you?’ Most of Naipaul’s books ask this question over and over again, and sometimes offer glimpses of a compassionate answer. In Magic Seeds, however, there is no compassion. Halfway through the book, the English journalist tells Willie this story:
We got a man out from Argentina in 1977 or 1978. He had been horribly tortured. One of the first things he wanted to do when he came here was to go to the shops. One of the shops he went to was Lillywhites. It’s bang on Piccadilly Circus. A sports shop. He stole a set of golf clubs there. He wasn’t a golf player. It’s just that he spotted the chance to steal. Some old guerrilla or criminal or outlaw instinct. He didn’t know why he had done it. He dragged those clubs to the bus stop, and then dragged them all the way from Maida Vale to the house, and displayed them. Like a cat bringing back a mouse.Now it may well be that there are some men who after being ‘horribly tortured’ will commit a criminal act; there may be some who will steal, or beat up a friend, or swear at a policeman, or tell a lie. But to pick such an example as the rule, to respond with such a story to the question ‘Who are you?’ is worse than any of these things. It is acting in bad faith. It is believing that your tiny experience of the awfulness of the world reflects the world. It is mistaking gossip for truth. It is unconvincing. And because it is unconvincing it is poor literature. Harold Nicolson notes that however soothing to the nerves, Herbert Spencer’s soft-textured suit ‘was not aesthetic’. Perhaps, without the scorn, Naipaul’s exquisitely cut prose might hang too loosely on the narrative. Perhaps, but there would then be a creature of flesh and blood under the wraps, who cared for how his humour affected his creations. In an address given to the Manhattan Institute of New York in 1992 on what he called ‘Our Universal Civilisation’, Naipaul concluded by saying that he had only recently realised ‘the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness’.
So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.Splendid words, especially if we believe in the pursuit of happiness as the microcosm, and a happy world as the macrocosm. Magic Seeds, however, ends with an idea which is almost the exact opposite of the former. ‘It is wrong,’ Willie thinks at the conclusion of the book, ‘to have an ideal view of the world. That is where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.’ Whether the tone is meant to be ironical, sarcastic or censorious, these lines, written at the end of Willie’s quest, do not ring true, neither to the character, nor to the narrative, certainly not to the philosophy Naipaul himself outlined barely a dozen years ago. The reader feels as if here, in these last moments, Naipaul has all of a sudden dismissed his fictions and stepped himself on to the stage. This is not Willie speaking, the reader says; these are the words of an angry old man who no longer believes in ‘the immense human idea’ he once thought beautiful.
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