A review written nearly 20 years ago – the book was V S Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival and the reviewer Salman Rushdie – ended with the observation that the word 'love' could be found nowhere in the text and that this was "very, very sad."
I am happy to report that that word occurs at least once in Naipaul's latest novel, Magic Seeds. It comes towards the end of the book. The protagonist, Willie Chandran, is listening to his friend Roger, a lawyer in London, as he describes his feelings for his mistress. Roger says, "Having got to know Marian, I wished to know no other woman in that special way, and I wonder whether that cannot be described as a kind of love: the sexual preference for one person above all others."
There is little love in this novel, but I didn't miss it, and not only because there is such distance that divides Naipaul's characters from each other. The truth is that a greater distance divides Willie from himself – and Naipaul is exact, if not also exacting, in his mapping of the arid landscape of loneliness and dislocation.
Willie Chandran's early life – his unhappy boyhood in southern India, his travel to England for his education and then his later stay in Africa – had been the subject of Naipaul's previous novel, Half a Life. The current work takes up the narrative with Willie in his early forties. The story is told in two parts: the first half is set almost entirely in India and is presented as an account of Willie's travels – and travails – with a murderous Maoist group; the shorter second section follows Willie's return to London, where he had spent his youth as an insecure, indigent student.