 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Magic Seeds
By V.S. Naipaul
Picador $30.00
 Although ensconced in the English countryside with a knighthood and a well-deserved reputation, V.S. (Sir Vidia) Naipaul continues to fulminate about the state of the world, and his intolerance again finds its way into a novel.
Magic Seeds continues the story of Willie Chandran, the mixed-caste Indian who spent 18 years in a loveless marriage in one of Portugal's African territories during the long sunset of colonialism. Now he's in Berlin where his sister, a left-wing filmmaker, taunts him about his African experience.
'A poor and helpless people, slaves in their own land, starting from scratch in their own way. What did you do? Did you seek them out? Did you help them? That was a big enough cause for anyone looking for a cause.
'But no. You stayed in your estate house with your lovely little half-white wife and pulled the pillow over your ears and hoped that no bad black freedom fighter was going to come in the night with a gun and heavy boots and frighten you.'
Soon she persuades Willie to redeem his life by joining the guerrillas in southern India where he finds himself in a band of fanatics who terrorise peasants, attack police and slave over 'the classics' - Marx, Trotsky, Mao and Lenin.
Finally, the remnants of the group surrender to police and Willie is jailed. So far the book is a riveting read, albeit a reflection of Naipaul's opinions about liberation movements.
'That war was not yours or mine,' writes Willie to his sister from prison, 'and it had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for. We talked about their oppression but we were exploiting them all the time.'
In the second half of the novel, after Willie's release, negotiated by a London lawyer whom he knew long ago, Naipaul is less restrained, using Roger's sad affair with a woman from a council estate as window to view the lower orders whose sins include having ' three or four children by three or four men' so they can live on benefits.
By now, Willie is just a pair of ears into which Roger/Naipaul pour narrow views, so when Willie breaks his silence to say, 'It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world... That's where everything starts unravelling,' we see that by doing just that Naipaul has exposed his novel's own loose threads.
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