9 OCTOBER 1971, Page 15

Auberon Waugh on V. S. Naipaul

In a Free State V. S. Naipaul (Deutsch £1.75) If Mr Naipaul wrote less well, if he were not able to give at any rate this reviewer the same sort of pleasure by his writing as a cat quite plainly receives from being stroked, one might accuse him of playing a cruel practical joke on the critics and on the reading public. The novel from which his new book takes its title is only 134 Pages long. This is what we call in the trade a long short story. They have much to be said for them, especially from the writer's point of view, except that they are virtually unsaleable. Muriel Spark, who seems to have developed a taste for writing them, too, persuades Macmillan to set them in huge type with plenty of white Space and sell them as full-length novels. Mr Naipaul, more profligate or more generous, gives us another two short stories and a couple of travel pieces which might have been returned to him by the Managing Editor of the Daily Telegraph Magazine. Nobody can reasonably complain about that, except that in the trade we know that such collected volumes, whether of Short stories, travelogues or a combination of both, are also extremely difficult to sell.

So cunning Mr Naipaul (no wonder the Asians were turned out of East Africa; no wonder neither the Socialists nor the Tories wanted them here) pretends that the book has some mysterious unity. The short novel in the middle, says the blurb, "is given a deeper meaning" by the two short stories which precede it. We also learn that the fiction "is enclosed by two pieces Of documentary, fragments of an Egyptian Journal: the Egyptians as officials in the first, as victims in the second." We are told that this may be V. S. Naipaul's best book. It is certainly his most original and complete. The blurb even promises us some sort of climax: "Here the writer speaks for himself, and right at the end of the book we see him act. We are admitted direct to the type of experience from Which the fiction has grown." Coo! And does the Dook of Marlborough really take tea in this room? The type of axperience to which we are admitted direct IS that Mr Vidia Naipaul, the deservedly distinguished writer, tells us how he once took a camel whip away from an Egyptian who was using it to beat some children. He Lhen throws the whip on the sand. He should have kept it and used it on his publishers. Frankly, I should not have thought that there was sufficient material in this incident even to make a joke on the Dave Allen Show. When he puts it at the end of collection and then calls the whole thing a ' sequence ' one is irresistibly r_eminded of Yankee Doodle whc put a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.

The way this book has been presented is not only dishonest, it is also unkind. One thinks how all the well-meaning, halfwitted reviewers in the serious quality weeklies and dailies will bend over backWards to detect subtle patterns of approach, themes, recurring imagery and all the other paraphernalia with which they like to impress their editors and assure the world that they once passed the English Literature paper at Advanced Level in the General Certificate of Education. One thinks of the endless ripples of boredom which will spread to every corner of this poor country as a result of the little joke between Mr Naipaul and Mr Deutsch. If either does it again, I shall take the matter up with my local weights and measures inspector with a view to prosecution under the Trade Descriptions Act. I find I have a greatly increased confidence in the processes of British justice just at present.

Well, then, to review Mr Naipaul's new book. His first essay, called the Prologue, is too slight a piece to merit attention here, being merely the account of an incident on a ferry crossing between Piraeus and Alexandria, when an English tramp is maltreated by some Arab fellow passengers. The next piece, about an Indian servant brought by his master to Washington, where he sleeps in a cupboard, is so funny, so touching and so sad that I found myself, like Bernard Levin after a visit to Midsummer Night's Dream at the Aldwych, seeing all the hubshi (Negroes) there. Later, he runs away from his master, who had been paying him $3.50 a week, and to remain in Washington, whose comforts have now corrupted him, he has to suffer the final dishonour of marrying a hubshi woman.

The next piece, 'Tell me who to Kill,' about a pair of West Indian hubshi brothers in London, has the same faultless ear for vernacular as its predecessor. It was slightly spoiled for me by a melodramatic incident involving another West Indian boy being stabbed and his body being put in a trunk. This never seems quite to resolve itself, although it may have been my fault for not reading with sufficient attention. Mr Naipaul's projection of himself into the mind of a confused uneducated West Indian is masterly, and these two pieces by themselves add up to very cogent reason for buying the book, sequence, piece of sustained writing or whatever one likes to call it.

The main short story or novelette is rather boring by comparison with these two. It describes a hazardous motor car journey through an East African country which is in the middle of a coup — the President has just ousted the King. One is never certain whether it is about the relationship between the two people in the car — an unstable male homosexual civil servant called Bobby and an oversexed housewife called Linda, both white — or whether it is about the relationship between vaFious types of whites and various types of blacks in independent Africa. Each study is a distraction from the other, but there are some excellent moments in it, observed with Mr Naipaul's appalling clarity. The trouble is that there is too much inconsequential small-talk, however accurate, and the novelette, although short, would have improved with further cutting. But there is enough that is truly excellent to make it essential reading for anyone who enjoys excellence.