Nilanjana S Roy: Banality's high priest

SPEAKING VOLUMES

A friend dropped by the other day, demanding to be entertained. "I can't talk to you right now," I said. "I'm reading Sir V S Naipaul's new book."

"So tell me about Magic Seeds," she said, "I'll listen while you read." I shook my head. "I can't do that," I said. "Naipaul takes the whole business of reading and writing very seriously indeed. To treat him as literary gossip would be to misread him completely. As it is, I'm not sure that anyone who's not a writer, including me, should read him. He told The Guardian this week in an interview that he fears the time when he will stop writing: 'Without writing, everything will become insipid. Reading would have no point, because a writer reads with a purpose.'"

My friend looked thoughtful. "So you should really ask a writer who's reading Naipaul what he thinks of the book?" she suggested. "I can't do that," I said.

"He's explained that he wouldn't know what to say to another writer. See, he says here: 'I would not know what to talk to another writer about. He would be thinking about his book. And I would be thinking about mine. And what would we think of to say to each other?'"

"Oh well," said my friend, slightly mystified. "Is the book any good?" I raised a supercilious eyebrow. "You can ask such a question about a writer who's won the Nobel Prize?" "Of course I can," she countered. "I already know he's good; but what about this book in particular?"

"It's about Willie Chandran, who was the protagonist of Half a Life, if you remember," I said. "Oh, he features here? Then perhaps Naipaul had really meant to call the earlier book Half a Novel." Her levity distressed me, but I persevered.

"Well, now he's exploring the idea of revolution; he joins an underground movement in India." "That's interesting," she said, perking up slightly. "And how does it go?"

"Not very well," I admit. And I read out a passage from Siddhartha Deb's review of Magic Seeds to her: "In this book, where the idea being confronted is the rationale behind mass political movements, his characteristic feeling for form, language and character is swamped by a tide of distaste for Maoists, Indian peasants, British workers, white liberals and women."

"Distaste," she says dreamily, "No one does distaste quite like Naipaul. So he doesn't believe in revolution any more than Willie does?" "Umm," I say, "He doesn't seem to have met the right sort of revolutionary perhaps, assuming there is a right sort. He told The Guardian that he met some people in India who'd been part of the guerrilla movement."

"And did he like them?" asks my friend. "No, wait, I know: he doesn't like anybody." "That's not true," I protest. "He likes his cat, Augustus, a lot. But no, he didn't seem to care much for the revolutionaries. He said they were 'middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish'."

"And then what happens to Willie?" she asked. "Oh, he goes to England""he's back in the country after a thirty-year absence""and he has an affair with a friend's wife," I say. "Excellent!" she says. "So which does Willie enjoy more, the affair, or England?"

"Neither," I say repressively, "it's just as well you're not a critic or you'd know that having fun isn't one of the great literary goals. He doesn't enjoy the affair because it's banal. And England is boring; it's been taken over by common people who have common holidays in common places. But there's no point talking about the book; to understand Magic Seeds you really have to read it."

"But the whole book seems to be about banality and boredom and disillusionment!" exclaims my friend. "Exactly," I say, pleased. "Willie says in one of the letters he writes but never sends to his sister, 'The day I understood the real world the optimism leaked out of me.' He speaks of the way in which life can never be simplified, how there's always 'some little trap or flaw in that dream of simplicity, of just letting one's life pass'."

My friend looks dubious. "I see," she says, not seeing at all. "So revolution lets you down, pleasure doesn't really exist, and modernity has nothing to offer""and in order to create an accurate picture of today's banal and boring world, one of its greatest writers has written a banal and boring novel."

"I never said it was banal or boring," I protest. "Yes, but I couldn't help noticing you've been yawning on every page," she says. "Ah, but that's the genius of Naipaul," I riposte.

"He makes you feel everything his characters are feeling, even when they're not feeling anything at all. Ennui and anhedonia, these are the two emotions that make up our modern world."

My friend looks even more dubious. "I'd rather read fantasy""like this new book by Susanna Clarke about rival wizards and the Napoleonic wars that I've been hearing about: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell." "Ha!" I say.

"Naipaul wouldn't approve at all; he says part of what's wrong with literature is that we're reading too much about little green men and alien worlds and magic. We're not interested in serious engagement with the ideas of our times."

"Well, Clarke's on the Booker longlist and she sounds like fun," says my friend defensively. "And if all our writers have to offer us is banal and boring books about banality and boredom, bring on the little green men, I say. Isn't there anything that would give Naipaul pleasure or return him to the kind of humour he used in A House for Mr Biswas?"

"You're a philistine," I tell her. "But there is one thing that would make Naipaul very happy. He finds the idea of religious war terrible, and he thinks some countries should be destroyed. Like Saudi Arabia, which he says has contributed nothing to the world""'it has just filled gambling dens or brothels'."

"He can't be serious!" she says. "Oh, he is and he wouldn't mind Iran being destroyed as well," I say. "Though we're hoping George Bush doesn't get to hear about Naipaul's wish. Not that the US President's in the business of making writers and intellectuals happy, but this is one request by a Nobel Laureate that he'd be only too thrilled to fulfil."

"Yes," says my friend, picking up Magic Seeds. "And then there'd be more than one Naipaul bomb, wouldn't there?"

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