Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 13 Dec 2018

The Enigma of Arrival by VS Naipaul

If A Bend in the River, VS Naipaul’s 1979 novel (reviewed HERE), is his most African, then The Enigma of Arrival, his 1987 novel, must surely be his most English and his most autobiographical. It also exemplifies the rather disorientating fiction-reportage-autobiography-social analysis style that Naipaul developed from the 70s on and which should be regarded as his own particular stylistic innovation in fiction writing. It is a fascinating if not entirely successful book. It was also the first novel Naipaul was to publish after A Bend in the River, the intervening years having been occupied entirely with writing non-fiction.

The novel opens with an unnamed narrator, presumably Naipaul, recounting at considerable length his gradual home-making – peace, recuperation from an unspecified illness and exhaustion – in a rented cottage in the grounds of a decaying country estate in Wiltshire. His landlord – again, never named, but modelled on the eccentric, decadent socialite Stephen Tennant, on whose estate Naipaul did indeed live – lives in the manor house. A working but unsuccessful farm – tenants turning over frequently; new buildings and facilities suddenly built and as swiftly falling into disuse; transient agricultural workers appearing and almost as soon as they arrive moving on to better offers elsewhere. Naipaul is showing us the English countryside through the eyes of an ‘Asiatic-colonial’ sensibility that is having to learn to read Englishness bit by bit. The style is curiously flat and repetitive; the narrative loops back and forth in time, sometimes peeling away the onion skin layers between fiction and reality as if to reveal (to use a phrase one imagines Naipaul would have liked and might himself have borrowed from Graham Greene, a similar master of disenchantment, unease and melancholy) ‘the heart of the matter’.

What Naipaul is doing is in fact very similar to his method in A Bend in the River: this small plot of land, this well-trodden bit of landscape (the narrator walks obsessively, exercising after long hours spent at his desk, one imagines), is a microcosm – not just of England, and not just of the economic and social forces that have created that landscape and its people, but also the forces that create and may eventually also reduce empires.

Even at his apparently most parochial, his most mundane, Naipaul is never far from the themes he professes to have discovered almost by accident: not the literary, metropolitan material which ‘glamoured’ him in his apprenticeship (‘glamoured’ is a favourite Naipaul word) and which he incidentally realises took the highly developed art-for-art’s-sake sensibility of Bloomsbury and high literary culture as the default model for all writing, but migration, displacement, the chaos of decolonisation and revolution, and the collapse of old certainties (whether of religion or culture or colonial societies). ‘Great subjects,’ he reflects at one point, ‘are illuminated best by small dramas’: and it is suddenly evident – in a way I had never previously realised – that if one had to try and sum up Naipaul’s underpinning approach in all his writing, it would be this, those eight words.

But in the nested narratives it also seems at times that Naipaul is allowing himself to coast, to ruminate, meditate, to take a break from the kind of writing that perhaps caused the unspecified illness and exhaustion he alludes to. At one point he explains that he has become fascinated by a painting by the Italian artist de Chirico called the Enigma of Arrival, and begins to invent a story, to be written in a deliberately flat, unadorned style neither contemporary nor mock-classical, which will recount the adventures of an anonymous figure from antiquity who has landed, for reasons he doesn’t understand, in the deserted, strangely still port de Chirico’s painting depicts. This, Naipaul explains, he conceived as offering respite from the demanding and exhausting book he is actually writing, which sounds like his 1971 novel, In a Free State. He doesn’t pursue this, of course, but he does concede that his writing about the English countryside, his endless walks, his bus rides into Salisbury, the nearest town, the passing traffic of agricultural life – this too is a form of distraction, a version of The Enigma of Arrival inspired by de Chirico’s painting of the same title, that Naipaul might have written.

The Enigma of Arrival doesn’t always work and I think it is also too long, but it is nonetheless an important novel in Naipaul’s body of work. It is essential to an understanding of the writer that Naipaul created by force of will and determination alone, a ‘quirk of literary ambition’, he says, which separated him from his ‘Asiatic-Hindu community’ and the handful of generations that lay between himself and ‘peasant India, colonial Trinidad’.

When The Enigma of Arrival came out in paperback in the very late-80s, I am ashamed to say I understood none of this and gave up reading after barely a hundred pages. In the intervening years I have read much more of Naipaul’s work as well as the superb biography by Patrick French, and I think this novel needs that background, that context.

If you’re curious about Naipaul and want to immerse yourself in his work, then this probably isn’t the place to start – it is a late work best come to from a position of some familiarity with the Naipaul worldview – but it is nonetheless amongst his most revealing achievements. For in this, moreso than in anything else of his I have so far read, he talks in the most brutally revealing way of the ‘shame and mortification’ of being ‘a colonial and a writer’. Schooled, elevated, by a ‘half-English half-education’, his ‘noblest impulse’ – that of becoming a writer – was also corrupted. Yet as a writer, he says, he could train himself to face up to these failings and weaknesses. ‘Indeed,’ he says, ‘they became my subjects.’ It is, as is all of Naipaul’s work, unflinching, unforgiving and without illusion.

 

Alun Severn

December 2018