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Magic Seeds

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Magic Seeds is the sequel to V.S. Naipaul's powerful novel, Half a Life. If you have not yet read that book, I strongly urge you to do so before you read this one. Otherwise, you will feel like Scotty beamed you up into a seat of an airplane on its way somewhere without any warning.

In Half a Life, Willie Chandran left his native India to pursue his education in England and found himself to be miserable there. With a little notoriety from his writing, he attracts the attention of a wealthy wife and moves to Africa where he lives an indolent life. In that book, Willie is established as someone too passive to seize on his own desires . . . and leads a shadow-like existence that doesn't please him.

In Magic Seeds, Willie has left Africa and finds himself as a temporary visitor in Berlin with his radicalized sister who wants him to return to India as a guerrilla fighter. While there, he realizes that revolutionary warfare is often more about the power lust of the revolutionaries than any potential benefit to those who they are supposed to be liberating. The resulting story is a scathing indictment of leftist revolutionary movements. After many years in the field, Willie turns himself in and is imprisoned. There, he finds that escaping the revolutionaries is almost as hard as ever . . . and his life still suffers from being too passive in the face of the resolve of others.

Unexpectedly released from prison, Willie returns to England and encounters the modern "civilized" world and finds it wanting as well. But Willie has started to grow up at last and begins to seize on initiative to get what he wants . . . and to learn from those who have been too greedy at following their impulses and ideologies. He even begins to see that there are times when being passive can be rewarding, and he begins to use passivity as a strategy to gain his ends. You also find out what happened to many of the characters who influence Willie in Half a Life.

The book's main weakness is that Mr. Naipaul is obsessed with the idea that people shouldn't be so easily swayed by others into making life-changing decisions based on limited information and spurious logic. They are looking for magic seeds that will lead them up Jack's beanstalk to slay a giant and gather up a hen that lays golden eggs. That's a silly search. There are no magic seeds. That theme is repeated and developed from every possible angle. The message overweighs the story so that this becomes more like a philosophical novel rather than a story-telling novel.

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.

Though he has won the Nobel Prize in literature, V.S. Nai paul has been criticized for rewriting the same story many times in more than a dozen novels. Naipaul's fiction often revolves around characters who lurch from place to place, searching for an identity that exists only in their imaginations.

"Magic Seeds" is this kind of novel, but it also demonstrates Naipaul's keen ability to explore human action and its motivation. Here, Naipaul returns to Willie Chandran, the central character in his 2001 novel, "Half a Life." As a cultural drifter, Willie easily fits into the strand of characters populating Naipaul's work.

In "Half a Life," he moves from India to London and finally to Africa in the late 1950s, where he marries a Portuguese woman and appears to settle. "Magic Seeds" jumps ahead 18 years to Berlin, where Willie, six months after leaving his wife, now lives "in a temporary, half-and-half way" with his sister Sarojini, experiencing the listlessness that has plagued him since his youth.

Willie's problem, as he sees it, is that he has always been "someone on the outside" for whom "time passes fruitlessly by." He garners little sympathy from Sarojini, who berates him with diatribes condemning his "colonial psychosis." She views Willie as a privileged man who has deliberately avoided taking on a meaningful life as a revolutionary.

According to Sarojini, Willie should have participated in a "glorious war" of revolution as an inhabitant of both India and Africa during times of upheaval.

"We all have wars to go to," she says, arguing that fighting to help people who are slaves in their own land should be viewed as an obligation.

Spurred by her criticism and the expiration of his visa, Willie joins a revolutionary group in India, sparking the most engaging part of "Magic Seeds." Willie's placement with communist guerillas is absurd, but it provides a window into the mind-sets of revolutionaries who could easily be described as terrorists, depending upon the observer's perspective.

In the post-Sept. 11 world, Willie's experiences here are significant. At first, he sees the revolutionaries as people unwilling to let go of old ideas about home and country. But as he lives and fights with them, he notices that some guerillas experience the same displacement as Willy, finding in their futile war a sense of purpose. Others are motivated by things as inane as sexual frustration, or as significant as childhood beatings or lifelong suffering due to the machinations of the upper classes.

Eventually, Willie is captured and thrown into jail, where the prison routine provides relief from life as a jungle fighter. From there, with comical luck, Naipaul shifts Willie to England, where he restarts his disengaged life working for an architectural magazine. His guerrilla experiences have jaundiced his view of the society in which he once maintained a static existence. By novel's end, Willie progresses toward finding himself at home in the world.

"Magic Seeds" occupies an identifiable place in Naipaul's philosophy, and those who generally enjoy his work will like what's here. Readers unfamiliar with his work have much to gain as well, though Naipaul's style can feel disengaged from reality. Conversations are heavily one-sided, characters are constantly in a mode of self-reflection, and as the second half of the novel progresses, the events in "Magic Seeds" have a fleeting, episodic quality.

Despite Naipaul's heavy-handed ways, his precise art offers something revelatory about society - even if he has revealed it before.

Willie Chandran, whom we met in "Half a Life" has, after 18 years, left his wife's farm in Africa and is now living with his married sister in Berlin. Willie still has not figured out what to do with his life, although he is now in his 40s. As we have learned, Willie comes from a family that has no marketable skills and subsists on the charity of others. Willie's sister convinces him that journeying to India to aid a certain band of revolutionaries is the thing for him to do. However, he seems to find his way to the wrong band of revolutionaries. But since there seems little to choose among these groups, he sticks it out and manages to survive in the forests and in prison for seven years. Then it's back to Berlin and rather shortly to London, where he moves in with an old friend and eventually acquires, through the friend's influence, a low-level position with an architectural magazine. At the end of the novel, Willie has about managed to talk himself out of pursuing his newfound interest in becoming an architect, owing to his age, which is now 52.

Naipaul's genius is in making Willie and his cast of friends and relatives complex enough that their situations elicit our sympathy and hold our interest. Unexpectedly, the strongest chapters in the book may be the last ones, which present the friend's condemnation of the deterioration of English life owing to the disappearance of the serving classes and to the sort of irresponsible council-estate existence perpetuated by the social-welfare state.

The title of "Half a Life" had a second meaning that became clear only after "Magic Seeds" was published. The latter isn't a sequel - it's the second half of the former.

There are many wonderful things about the combination novel, beginning with the almost magically concise style Naipaul has mastered, or more properly has invented. There are ironies within ironies, as in the comic parallels between the personal and sexual disappointments that drive Indian guerillas into the woods and drive the character of Roger into a Tom Wolfe style of conservative cultural politics. Both attempts to channel sexual frustration into politics are equally ineffectual to change the world, or even to avert personal calamity. Neither is ultimately much more than an expression of bitterness toward a world that refuses to conform to the individual's idealized vision of it - for the magic seeds that refused to sprout.

Throughout there are references to the way in which people pick up ideas of what they should be or say, and then try to act up to those ideas, or ideals - references that evidently go right over the heads of critics who insist on seeing the things the characters do and say as reflections of Naipaul, when they're not even true reflections of the characters themselves.

There is great pleasure in reading these extraordinarily well-written books, and a still-deeper pleasure in thinking them through after you finish. They're masterpieces that people will be reading with admiration and even awe a hundred years from now.

Yes, yes, we all know Naipual is a "great writer." Like most of his fiction I find Magic Seeds to work on the level of brilliant prose and fall flat on it's lack of empathy for human beings. This lack of empathy has grown to be a great detriment in Naipaul's work. Sparse, incisive sentences and long monologues can only carry a book so far. There's nothing new in Magic Seeds that wasn't said 30 years ago in Guerillas. Having said that, I think this book works pretty well for it's first half or so, but by the end I was bored and tired of the condescending attitude the author seems to have for his main character and by default, his readers. Great writers also include things like good dialogue, understanding of psychology and more subtle views of human interaction. I find his characters to be cardboard cutouts of people rather than convincing portraits. His dialogue is nonexistent. I don't see this as a new form of writing, just a monologue that is at times brilliantly written but often dull, repetitive, self absorbed and limited. He's a great technician but I don't see the depth of a truly great writer here.

"Magic Seeds'' is a sequel to Naipaul's 2001 novel Half a Life. "Magic Seeds" takes over where "Half a Life" left off - with Willie Somerset Chandran, a transplanted Indian, living with his sister Sarojini in Berlin. He was forced to come to Germany after a revolution in an unnamed African country (presumably Mozambique) forced him into exile. He had spent 18 years in Africa, and is ill at ease in the urban European setting. His sister arranges for him to return to India and become involved with communist guerrillas over there. He accepts this mission, but without any real sense of commitment to the rebels cause. He is quickly disillusioned with the guerrillas - their personal shortcomings and the ill-advised tactics of the movement - but remains involved with them partly out of inertia and partly out of fear that his former comrades might kill him. Eventually he gets captured and imprisoned, and finds life in prison preferable to the life on a run. He gets released from the prison when his London friend Roger arranges for an old collection of his short stories to be republished, which causes some embarrassment to the Indian government. Willie moves to London, and there he finds himself in an upper-middle class social set, and he slowly drifts into the life in the suburbs, with all its ironies and quiet sense of claustrophobia.

Naipaul brings his characteristic lyricism to this novel, and the narrative flow is very smooth and unencumbered. Willie is a stand-in for his own political and cultural musings, and one can surmise from reading "Magic Seeds" that Naipaul must have grown increasingly weary of revolutionary movements that are fueled with little more than the ideological idealism of people who are not at all familiar with the true circumstances on the ground. These people also tend to be poor judges of the consequences of their actions, on either themselves or more tragically others around them. "Magic Seeds" is very good literature, but it falls short of the kind of inspiring storytelling that was present in "Half a Life." Nonetheless, all fans of Naipaul's writing will appreciate this novel.

Magic Seeds is Naipaul's last or at least latest novel. It is written as the second part or a sort of sequel to `Half a Life'. Like most other novels of Naipaul, this one is also very autobiographical, not in details but in ideas. Willie, the hero is spending an uneventful but comfortable life in Berlin, with his sister. But his sister is restless and despite having a life of luxury and enjoying it with her husband Wolf, she is readying for a revolution, a revolution somewhere in India, a revolution of poor against the rich and the middle class, much on the socialist lines.

Later on we catch the action of the Naxalite movement in India. His sister goads him continuously and reproaches him for not being able to find a purpose in his life. A purpose in life for her is being a revolutionary, or being on a mission to engineer and change the world around you.

Referring to a person whom Willie met in the restaurant, she says:

`Do you know why that man is worth more than you? He has found his war.'

Gandhi is analyzed almost like a subject of non-fiction in this novel. Sarojini comments about Willie:

`When he was eighteen or nineteen Gandhi cam to England to study law. In London he was like a sleepwalker. He had no means of understanding the great city. He hardly knew what he was looking at. He had no idea of the architecture o the museums, no idea of the great writs and politicians who were hidden in the city of the 1890s. I don't think he went to a play. All he could think o was his law studies and his vegetarian food and cutting his own hair. Gandhi in London in 1890 was floating on an ocean of not-seeing and not-knowing. At the end of three years of this half-life and quarter-life he became dreadfully depressed. He felt he needed help."

This book of non-fiction conveys many things which are Naipaul's vision of the world, mainly conveyed through his non-fiction. Sarojini comments on Indians also:

`They feel they know it all. They don't have to find out. It's the Indian way.'

He then goes to India to join the revolution, but as soon as he joins them, he feels it all wrong, and indeed his sister writes to him that he has joined other people then she had intended to. The revolution has split like all other revolutions and he has joined the wrong side, like everybody else. He becomes disillusioned,

`I don't know what cause I am serving, and why am I doing what I do'

He experiences revolutionaries, common people and the relations between them. He finds it all artificial, false. Their grievances, their motivations and their aims are all imaginary. In a very unromantic manner, he attacks the romantic ideas of the revolutionaries. While putting up in the house of a revolutionary,

`less than an hour later, lying in Shivdas's bed below the high, black, cool thatch, in a warm smell of old clothes and tobacco which was like the smell of the third-class railway compartment of just a couple of hours before, Willie thought, `We think, or they think, that Shivdas does what he does because he is a peasant revolutionary, someone created by the movement, someone new and very precious. But Shivdas does what he does because he is instinctively following old ideas, old ways, old courtesies, on day he will not give up his bed to me. He will not think he needs to. That will be the end of the old world, and the end of the revolution.'

Describing a revolutionary he says,

`He liked tramping through villages in his uniform, browbeating villagers, and talking of revolution; he liked living off the land, and this to some extent meant living off village people; he liked being important. He was completely uneducated, and he was a killer. He sand dreadful revolutionary songs whenever he could; the contained the sum of his political and historical wisdom.'

In such a meeting of the revolutionaries, he thinks,

`They all want the old ways to go. But the old ways are part of people's being. If the old ways go people will not know who they are, and these villages, which have their own beauty, will become a jungle.'

At last he gets out of it, through his ingenious sister Sarojini. He then has to go to England to live for te rest of his life. In Africa also although he lived there for 18 years, he denied to be a part of the revolution happening there. In his seven years in India, he also comes to deny it.

More importantly, he comes to deny the whole idea of a revolution. In `Beyond Belief', Naipaul denies the idea of revolution, as a false notion which is too simplistic to carry over the complexities of life and the many different worlds of the men participating in it. `In India: A Million Mutinies Now' he also raises this question. `Magic Seeds', contains many ideas which are discussed in `India: A Million Mutinies Now'.

He regards ideologies as false, as they fail to integrate the immense complexity of life. There is no single solution to the problems of life and so we should not aim for such a thing. An ideology, a revolution is such an attempt to solve many problems by one stroke. This simply is impossible according to Naipaul.

`But I know enough now to understand that life can never be simplified like that, and that there would be some little trap or flaw in that dream of simplicity of just letting one's life pass, of treating one's life only as a way of passing the time.'

In his final words in the novel,

`It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts.'

According to Naipaul, there are no magic seeds which can cure every problem of life. They simply don't exist.

This is the bottomline of Naipaul's life and his work. To see the world, as it is, to steal the phrase from the starting line of the novel, `The Bend in the River'. This is what Naipaul has striven for whole his life, throughout his works, not to see world through any lenses of any color, whatever that may be. In every work of his, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, the overwhelming sense we get is to view the world as a detached observer, without any prism of ideology, without any coloring of -ism. World is what it is, with all its faults and problems, but we try to impose upon this reality our many -isms. This is what Naipaul denies. This is his intellectual honesty. The acceptance of reality, of truth without any romantic yearning for correcting anything in it.

In this case `Magic Seeds' is a good novel, but I don't think that after writing such good non-fiction regarding this subject like, `Beyond Belief', `India: A Million Mutinies Now', `Finding the Centre', `Literary Occassions' etc. he need have written a novel regarding it.

- Pankaj Saksena

Initially, I found this a very difficult novel to get into. It certainly was not an instant 'page turner'. I struggled to engage with, and feel any empathy for, the protagonist Willie Chandran. The setting and context felt ungrounded and unreal. The dialogue between Willie and his sister Sarojini was hackneyed and artificial. I perservered because Naipaul's reputation preceded him. If the author had been an 'unknown' I doubt I would have persisted and forced myself to read beyond page 10.

I am glad I stuck at it. As soon as Willie leaves Berlin to join the revolutionary guerillas in India the book transforms into a philosophical masterpiece. For me, the plot is a meditation on post modernity. Its themes are: the dangers of misguided political ideology, the universality of individual psychosis, social fracturing and fragmentation, isolation, cultural disorientation, and the mourning and yearning for an imaginary, distorted or even mythical past.

The anomie that pervades all the characters, and in particular defines Willie is reminiscent of Mersault in Albert Camus's 'The Outsider'. Indeed, I see Willie as the post modern reincarnation or successor to Camus's revolutionary anti-hero, but without any of the redeeming joy and love of life that so defined Mersault. In its unrelenting bleakness and despair, Magic Seeds holds up an unsettling mirror to capture the chaotic nihilism of victorious homogenised capitalism and globalisation. That the novel proffers no soothing antidote or alternative makes this work a brutally unforgettable and disquieting experience.

As an admirer and reader of most of Naipaul's work, it is sad to see the shallowness of his recent novels. Magic Seeds is a story of the inner commentary on life by characters with no insight, who lead passive, childish and sterile lives. What a waste. Perhaps, in his bitterness, Naipaul finds amusement creating these wretches or perhaps, in the end, he really has nothing to say.
Give it a pass. It is empty.