An existence without joy

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The artistry of VS Naipaul can be divined from the first lines of Half a Life. "Willie Chandran asked his father one day, 'Why is my middle name Somerset? The boys at school have just found out, and they are mocking me.'

"His father said without joy, 'You were named after a great English writer. I am sure you have seen his books about the house.'"

Like a series of musical variations, the novel that follows these lines never departs from them in essence. Half a life is how long it takes Willie to travel from childish curiosity to adult disillusion: it is the distance between an innocent question and an experienced answer.

Willie Chandran's father has made this journey himself. Born to a family of Indian civil servants, his future has already been bequeathed to him. "The plan was that I should get a BA degree and then perhaps get a scholarship from the maharajah to do medicine or engineering. Then I was to marry the daughter of the principal of the maharajah's college. All of that was settled." Chandran senior regards this future with a sort of existential indifference. Nothing seems real to him. It is in this spirit that he embarks on a career of passive rebellion. He does no work for his degree, to little effect. ("They wanted to fail you," says his father. "The principal of the college had to talk them out of it.") More daringly, he goes daily to a local cafè where he sits silently at the table of a low-caste girl until a scandal has been generated. Then he takes a vow of silence and stands week after week in the temple courtyard. Tourists come to look at him, among them Somerset Maugham.

But in the end, in spite of its eccentricity, Willie's father's life was a more or less accurate reflection of the mixture of environment and self that is human identity: he got away and he didn't get away. Willie's own experiences, by that logic, will take over where his father's left off.

In his twenties, Willie goes to London to take up a place at a college for mature students procured for him by one of his father's contacts from his tourist-attraction phase. He makes friends and begins to write ficsivetion: a book of his stories is published, and a young African woman writes him a fan letter. Willie is lonely and lost: the young woman, Ana, has a life she can offer him back in her home country, a Portuguese colony. They return to her family's large estate and live there for two decades, during which time Willie's love for Ana shades into boredom and a sensual preoccupation with a life that is beginning to seem to him unlived. He finds, as his father found before him, that his existence lacks reality. He visits prostitutes, and finally leaves Ana. "I am 41," he says. "I am tired of living your life." "Perhaps it wasn't really my life either," she replies.

This is brilliant, affecting stuff: the novel's melancholy drama is played out on the furthest margins of fiction, where things are recollected rather than observed. The half of life that Naipaul delineates here is the half that is composed of pure pointlessness. Its shadowy other, where joy and fulfilment and meaning lie, is implied but not assured. Willie, certainly, experiences terror at the thought that it might not exist at all. "Who will rescue that man?" he asks, of a poor labourer being abused by his employer. "Who will avenge him?" It is a good question.