Customer Reviews

Mr. Stone and the Knight's Companion

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Many of V.S.Naipaul's books are set in his native Trinidad, or other Caribbean islands, or locales such as Africa. This novel, however, is entirely set in England and all the characters are English. Richard Stone, a sixty-two year old bachelor is a librarian in a corporation who is approaching retirement. Unnerved at the prospect, he suddenly decides to marry. He also draws up a plan whereby his company can help its retired employees who are now pensioners, many living in penury. The plan, against all odds, becomes a success but Naipaul shows how victories can be bittersweet. A charming book, and a real treat to read even just for the style and the use of language.

This is a truly moving and brilliant book about a man who discovers the creative impulse late in life. Unlike Naipaul's customery set of third-world characters, this one is an Englishman, which sets this book apart. We witness a novelist with great imaginative power, a first-rate talent.

Stone discovers he can create, with all its joys, its trials, and disappointments. He also finds love of a sort, which he struggles to pursue and maintain.

Warmly recommended.

MR STONE AND THE KNIGHTS COMPANION
By V S Naipaul
Published by Penguin Books, 1973, 126 pages
Reviewed by K V Veloo
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V S Naipaul is one of my favourite Nobel Laureates in literature. I have read most of his books. For some reason, his book "Mr Stone and the Knights Companion" did not catch my eye until lately. I am glad I did. I would have felt miserable if someone had told me that I missed reading one of his most brilliant books written in such literary delight.

It is a book that I would recommend to all those who are facing retirement. Pre-retirement invariably breeds anxiety and confusion. The morbid thoughts of growing old, sick and frail and even death become painful and discomfiting. The story line is simple: mundane and so real, as if the life events portrayed are that of a family living in one's less affluent neighbourhood. The message it conveys is much deeper and profound. It deals with prospects of growing old. Growing old is not always fun.

The book would go well with those engaged in policy initiatives on retirement counselling and preparation. Service providers for the elderly may pick up some valuable tips from the Knights Companion visitation programme. I have not heard of such an imaginative and useful initiative being promoted among our local companies, pensioners' societies or in the civil service.

The story is about Mr Richard Stone, a bachelor in his 60s, who is terribly anxious and perturbed at his impending retirement. He works as Head Librarian at Excal Corporation. He lives alone and is dependent on his maid, the "heavy old Miss Millington", for running his household. The monotony and drabness of his life is tied up between his office and home. In his desperation to fend away his end-career crisis and loneliness he marries a 50 year old widow, Margaret Springer whom he meets at a friend's home. He falls for her loquacious and jocular disposition; very opposite to his own personality as a disciplinarian and creature of habit. Marriage does not help. He still has difficulty in coping with his leisure hours, relationship with his wife and prospect of losing his job.

Mr Stone comes out with a brilliant plan to stay alive in his career by introducing the Knights Companion, a euphemism for a "befriender" programme, a sort of "good neighbour programme". The Knights Companion is designed to take care of the welfare of and to relieve the loneliness of the housebound retired company employees who are pensioners. Under the scheme pensioners visit pensioners, "take them a little gift from the company and build relationships that "are more than business relationships". The fundamental aim is to solve problems of old age- to rescue them from inactivity and preserve the comradeship of the office and thereby the loyalty to the company. The scheme is hailed as a brilliant company public relations and corporate welfare programme. The Knight Companions is an instant success.

Mr Stone is promoted and moved to welfare, to a new office in a new building. A new lease of life full of hope and opportunities emerge. He regains his worth and dignity. As with all good things, they must come to and end. He faces the stark reality of life. "There remained to him nothing to which he could anchor himself." The silver lining that he desperately sought, he discovers, was within him.

A short and sweet story about a man who confronts retirement, aging and death through a unique plan to help others in the same situation - the organization of the Knights Companions. Yet he learns that he must eventually face and experience these stages of life.

With the impending publication of Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death by Martin Yalom, it may be time to look at some attempts in fiction to answer questions about the terror of death.
Mr. Stone has just retired (at an age that would seem quite young to most Americans) and he is terrified at the bleakness of his life without his job as a librarian for an insurance company.
With a deftly underplayed hand, V.S.Naipaul leads us through the late-blooming creativity in the Mr. Stone's bachelor soul that takes him out of his tiny, safely ordered world and into unaccustomed relations with others. He marries for the first time and starts an organization of retirees dedicated to mutual assistance (the Knights Companion of the title).
There is no sentimentality here and Mr. Stone is not spared by his inventiveness. Instead, his life becomes a suffused with meaning and he lives it a bit more fully. This is a beautifully moral tale without the burden of parable. I reread it this week, and being twenty years closer to the inevitable than I was when I first read it, I found it especially and gently moving.

Lynn Hoffman, author of the raucously uplifting bang BANG: A Novel and the thoroughly voluptuous New Short Course in Wine,The