Magic Seeds

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

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.

This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. The story was thoroughly engaging. I found the message to be profound. Much of what we do, our causes our affiliations are all to satisfy our vanity. The theatre is more important than the cause. Willie realizes this after involving himself in a radical guerilla group that was trying to free the oppressed poor peasants. We discover that the guerillas were really just into it for themselves, the feeling of grandure, the vanity. This group like so many like it just became another way of life and were barely tolerated by the deserving poor. Great read!

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.

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