Half a Life

"At home his life had been ruled by his mixed inheritance. It spoilt everything. Even the love he felt for his mother, which should have been pure, was full of the pain he felt for her circumstances."

Naipaul's Half a Life is really fixated on those half-and-half peoples, both in terms of caste and race. Willie Chandran, the protagonist, is born to a brahmin of the priestly caste who shames his family, all int he name of sacrifice like the Mahatma, by marrying a "backward" (Untouchable), from his college. Willie, named for the famous English writer, William Somerset Maugham, is trapped by this mixed-caste background, eventually fabricating his own identity as a college student in 1950s London. Befriending a "brown" Jamaican student, Willie participates in the multicultural bohemian Notting Hill parties, literary gatherings with an interesting cast of characters via his English friend, Roger, and experiences a changing London where the Notting Hill riots break out before his book, a collection of short stories, receives negative reviews in the press. 

One fan of his work, Ana, a mixed-race woman from Mozambique, which is never explicitly stated in the text, a second-rank Portuguese in the colonial setting, becomes close with Willie, who finds comfort with her. He later asks to return to Africa with her, spending 18 years helping manage her estate , seeing African prostitutes in the capital, finding pure satisfaction through an affair with a married "mixed-race" woman, and eventually realizing he was following in his father's path, a path of nondecision, not proclaiming and living life but trying to live someone else's life. These themes of disillusion, mimicry, and an near obsession over the "real" and the place of those caught between worlds, are hardly new to Naipaul's work, but the India of Willie and his  parents provides a new setting for Naipaulian worlds. The ease in which Willie enters the world of Ana and the second-rank Portuguese of Mozambique, mostly second-rank because of their partial African ancestry, and the historical colonial links between Portuguese Goa and the colony, illustrate this tension of the intermediary, the "mixed-race" caught between the fictional worlds of black and white, Brahmin and Untouchable.

One wishes Sarojini's character, the sister, and Marcus the West African were present in more of the book, but the most surprising thing about this novel is how it recycles older themes and settings but is still something different. There is a rich sense of humor in this tale, particularly in the London setting, and the numerous fake or lying characters, including the protagonist. In a sense, Half a Life is very similar to The Mimic Men: both feature uprooted characters of Indian origins who go off to a changing London, experience sexual frustration (although Willie finds the satisfaction that Ralph never discovers), commentary on the colonial peoples (Caribbean, Africa, and India), and the facades all peoples use to masque themselves (racial, colonial, political, sexual), to hide who they truly are. Half a Life, in that regard, is hardly a new or radical step in Naipaul's fiction, yet provides a surprisingly different take on Africa, still bearing Conradian aspects (the darkness, difficult tropical climate, the reversion of the colonial structures to the "bush") but finding commonality between India and Africa.