Magic Seeds

Magic Seeds is the second part of Naipaul’s 2001 novel, Half a Life. Published three years after the first novel, Magic Seeds is about the adventures of Willie Chandran as he continues on his journey to achieve masculinity and feel like a complete man. Willie had left his wife Ana in Africa at the end of Half a Life after telling her that he was sick of living somebody else’s life.

Urged on by his sister Sarojini with whom he spends a few months in safe and protected Berlin, Willie is attracted to a peasant uprising, somewhere in Andhra Pradesh. A reading of Gandhi’s autobiography in a library convinces Willie that he must go to India and be a part of the movement. The thought of going back to India, which he had left as a young man in Half A Life, initially fills Willie with a feeling of pride. He feels that he might finally achieve the grace and fulfilment of the secure people he had come across during his time in London and Africa. But this feeling of pride turns into panic when he reaches the airport lounge where Indian passengers are waiting. The ways of the Indian passengers makes Willie feel like he is going back to a life and a country which he thought he was done with. Willie longs to be back in a luxurious Berlin restaurant. Naipaul seems to suggest that like he had done throughout his life, Willie decides to go to India on an impulse. It is Willie’s way of drifting through his life jumping from one accident into another. Salim, the main character in Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, who leaves his family and moves to another part of Africa to become a successful businessman only to be faced by fear and insecurity due to the violence of Africa, came to mind while reading Magic Seeds.

After joining the guerrilla movement, Willie slips into anomie. He realizes that his fellow guerrillas are cold-blooded killers. He makes a deduction that lack of sexual fulfilment could be the driving force behind many of the men joining the movement. During this time, Willie commits a murder and also witnesses the murder of a few policemen. Bewildered and unhappy, Willie desperately tries to contact his sister to inform her that joining the movement was a grave mistake. And a letter from Sarojini informs him that she has left her life in Berlin as a left-wing revolutionary and joined their father’s ashram. Willie feels that the guerrilla movement is something that is imposed upon the peasants and that he has no way of truly knowing what exactly the peasants want from their lives.

Willie is soon arrested by the police but seems to lack any kind of perspective or remorse regarding the violent acts committed by him and his comrades. However, a book he had written during his youth in London, now considered a masterpiece of post colonial literature helps Willie gain asylum in Britain. Willie feels that he might finally live some of the simple peaceful life that he had longed for in Britain. But an unfulfilling affair with his friend Roger’s wife and a changing Britain characterized by aggressive immigrants and a slothful British working class leaves Willie as unhappy as ever.

The idea of people drifting through life by jumping from one accident to another as if there are magic seeds which would give them fulfilment is one of the main themes of this novel. It is one of the bleakest novels Naipaul has ever written. The vicious humour in Willie and Sarojini’s letters as they stumble and waver from one ideology to another is Naipaul at his cynical best. Magic Seeds is a great last novel from the man whom Christopher Hitchens described as “seemingly unassailable”. Here, Naipaul is unassailable in that he is unwilling to offer any kind of respite or consolation to the characters in this searing account of the life of a wounded man from a wounded civilization.

Dear Magic Seeds, I'm sorry - it's me, not you. Really, you are too good for me. you are sweet and patient but I'm just at a different place in my life. I need something more! Call it a midlife crisis, call it a terminal case of immaturity! but right now I need uproarious laughter or crass sex. I need words so beautiful they make me gasp and drop the pages. I don't have the patience for subtlety of plot or unfulfilled flirtations with characters. I will probably regret it someday but for now, I need to say goodbye to you.

“It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world.
That's where the mischief starts.”
- V S Naipaul, November 2005

************
Willie Chandron, now living in Berlin with his sister Sarojini and her German husband for six months, is confronted once again with what to do with himself after 18 years in Africa. Sarojini is politically active, and compares the worlds of order and desperation that are represented by West and East Germany. Born of an outcaste mother and a Brahmin father, Naipaul portrays her as intelligent and worldly, although given to a 1970’s retro regard for Lenin and Mao. Back in Mozambique, where he abandoned his life, the insurgency wipes out colonial towns and homes. He left Africa, not to escape the threat of war but out of boredom with his wife and her colonial friends, reaching Europe just in time.

Inspired by her conviction Willie goes back to India to search for Kondapalli, a revolutionary in Andhra Pradesh, who took part in the Telegana Rebellion in the late 40’s as Secretary of the Communist Party of India. After weeks in a provincial town with filthy hotels, bad food and slow moving trains, he is led through the forest to an insurgent camp. After his basic training he is sent on a mission with another man but given no instructions. They await money and plans and finally have to work to survive. It turns out Willie is with the wrong guerrilla group, a band of bloody killers, and begins to question the point of even being there. Once again he has put himself in the hands of others, but is learning self reliance.

A recruit betrays the movement and is summarily executed as the police close in. Willie’s letters with Sarojini have been read and his partner is arrested at the post office; he is next on the list. Naipaul creates a suspense that is often found in thrillers, but seldom in his books. Inexplicably Willie takes a train back to the guerrilla base, instead of to his home in Europe, as he contemplates the futility of the revolution. It seems he is trying to prove something to himself. The base is a village held by guerrillas in fatigues wearing a red star on their caps and guns slung over their backs. Ironically the landlords are replaced by paramilitary freeloaders living off their labor and indoctrinated with Maoist mumbo jumbo.

The villagers want the Marxist squad to kill people for them, while the squad wants the villagers to kill landlords. Some think shooting the villagers would solve both problems and desertion is widespread. Naipaul presents this in a satirical light but it’s not far from reality. Kondapalli, now a mental invalid, is arrested and a kidnapping of a Minister planned to even the score. Predictably the keystone comrades plans go awry. Willie allows himself to be ordered to kill a peasant in cold blood, duly facing a mental anguish, and resolves to escape the maniacs. He and the squad leader sneak away, surrender to the police and are promptly thrown in jail. Naipaul turns the book into a morality play and a warning.

Willie, by dint of his sister’s efforts and his previous book, escapes a ten year jail sentence and is sent to England on a special amnesty. Certain themes are reoccuring in Naipaul’s writing such as radical politics leading to extreme violence. His reporting on the Black Power movement and Michael X which led to murders in 1972 was fictionalized in his 1975 novel ‘Guerrillas’. Landing in London Willie is now over fifty with no prospects and having learned nothing. He is required to stay in the UK under the terms of his release. Staying with Roger, who had helped get him out of prison, he begins an affair with his wife, who is currently seeing a third man. This might as well be a page torn from Naipaul’s own life.

Late 1980’s London has changed since Willie left in the late 1950’s but class consciousness is still there, the streets crowded with immigrants from all over the former Empire. He gets a job writing for an architectural magazine owned by one of Roger’s rich friends. Attending architecture classes Willie feels he missed his calling; Naipaul had an interest in architecture. The friend Peter is a banker whose wife enjoys trysts with other men and Roger has a side romance too. Willie is glad that work extricates him from these sexual obligations and finds futility all around him. Predictably Naipaul’s writes pages of criticism for Muslim and Hindu faiths and a paen to the practical achievements of the West.

Roger is caught in a property acquisition scheme as Peter’s lawyer and may lose his house, blaming it on socialism, high taxes and loss of family values. He also talks about a friend from the Carribean who tried to breed the black out of his grandchildren’s skin with six different white women and varying success. Not speaking of politics before, Roger now goes on a Tory rant. I haven’t seen Naipaul in this light before and it’s not a good look. The last third of the book descends into a tawdry soap opera. He begins to date a friend of his father’s housekeeper. Rancor towards public housing and illegitimate children are deemed to be the collapse of civilization. The story ends with an interracial wedding and without any resolution to the futures of Roger or Willie.

This is an unusual example of Naipaul abandoning the fictionalized world he knew for a story probably gleaned from newspapers and politics, unless of course he led a secret life as a revolutionary. The closest example could be ‘Killings in Trinidad’, but that was a work of non-fiction. It’s not difficult to discern where Naipaul stands in his thoughts on socialism but Willie is more of a mysterious character, intelligent, sensitive and yet struggles in his life. Like Naipaul he is a Brahmin and also a published English university man. One wonders what he is doing in the forest with an AK-47. On the whole it’s not a bad book but Naipaul has done much better over the course of his 50 year career.

مرة أخرى رحلة البحث عن الذات مع ويلي تشاندران؛ وأدب ما بعد الاستعمار وهو تخصص نايپول صاحب نوبل 2001، ومثير الجدل على الدوام من آراء وأسلوبه الأدبي ذو المرارة والحنق وهل هو أدبي أم صحافي؟

كنت قد قرأت الجزء الأول من هذه الرواية "نصف حياة" منذ ستة أشهر؛ وتدور في بريطانيا وأفريقيا، وهأنذا أكمل الجزء الثاني "بذور سحرية" وهو جزء مكمل لرحلة ويلي تشاندران مع عودته للهند. من اسمه الشخصي نفسه؛ نستطيع أن نرى الانقسام والازدواجية اسم أول إنجليزي وإسم عائلي هندي.

"كان لدي أسباب كثيرة للشعور بالخزي، سواء في الهند أو لندن أو أفريقيا؛ وهي ما تزال حية حتى بعد عشرين عامًا. لا أظن أنها ستموت أبدًا؛ لن تزول إلا بزوالي أنا".

وهنا بالطبع نرى النموذج الهندي لأدب ما بعد الاستعمار؛ وذلك لأن نايپول بريطاني من أصول هندية وجاء من ترينيداد في البحر الكاريبي؛ حيث كان الاستعمار البريطاني ودوره في تشويه الشعوب المستعمرة وتحويلها لمسوخ بشرية تحاول تقليد المستعمر؛ ولكن تفشل بصورة فجة لأنها بعيدة كل البعد عن طبيعة بلادهم الأصلية.

نشعر ونحن نقرأ أدب نايپول إحساسه الدائم بالمرارة والكوميديا السوداء في سرده في معظم أعماله؛ وكنت قد قرأت له عدة أعمال أخرى وأعجبني أسلوبه الشبيه بصنع الله إبراهيم الصحفي أكثر منه أدبي؛ الملئ بالمرارة والقسوة والحقد ونقد المجتمع المحيط.

ويلي تشاندران هنا الهندي المنبهر بالمستعمر، وشعوره المستمر بالنقص والانبهار وهو ما يميز السرد العام هنا، وانطباع نفسي من الكاتب ومادته الكتابية في معظم أعماله.

"في هذا العالم الخالي من الحرب والخطر الحقيقي أصبح البشر بسطاء، يراقبون التلفزيون فيجدونه صورة عن مجتمعاتهم؛ يأكلون ويشربون أطعمة صادقت عليها الحكومة؛ وهم يحصون أموالهم. أما في ذلك العالم الآخر فالبشر أكثر إحباطًا؛ فاقدًا الأمل في دخولهم إلى العالم المرتب والمبسط".

تتفق أم تختلف مع الكاتب، ولكن أسلوبه وكتابته باذخة، استخدامه للكلمات رائعة، متمكن من عمله بطريقة فذة وخبرة حياتية فائقة.

نرى هنا ويلي تشاندران بعد قضاء سنوات في انجلترا ومستعمرة برتغالية في أفريقيا، يرجع مرة أخرى للهند وينضم لرجال حرب العصابات في زمن تحرير الشعوب، ليس حبًا منه في الثورة، ولكن كنوع من دفن ذاته الاستعمارية مع فقراء الهند.

نلاحظ هنا في كتابة نايپول أنه انجليزي أكثر من الإنجليز أنفسهم، من قسوة على شعوب العالم الثالث، ويضع بطل الرواية وأبناء المستعمرات في مشاهد وأوصاف تصف فشلهم وحركاتهم التحررية الفاشلة.

وفي النهاية نرى ويلي تشاندران يقول لوصف شعوره العام "إنه الأمر الوحيد الذي عملت عليه طوال حياتي، ليس لأن أكون في دياري حيثما وجدت، بل لأبدو وكأنني في دياري".

The second and final leg of Willie's journey after he comes back to India to join a movement.
Full review to come soon.

It was long and meandering (and because of that it seemed even longer, though the book length is perfectly average). It was good in some parts, boring in others, and it had a few overwhelming moments of brilliance (though truly just a few). It was nice for mellow thought-provoking subway rides. Then again, there do exist much better books for those subway rides.

Not to say that this isn't a good book. I simply couldn't identify with the protagonist's efforts to be part of a revolution in India, or any other phase of his life. Reading about a lot of suffering for little point, for me. Then, strangely, a long monologue at the end by a friend about his love life.

“...our ideas of doing good to other people, regardless of their need, are out of period, a foolish vanity in a changed world. And I have grown to feel, making that point much larger, that the nicer sides of our civilization, the compassion, the law, may have been used to overthrow that civilization.”