Magic Seeds [Hardcover]

In Half a Life, Willie Chandran left his native India to pursue his education in England and found himself to be miserable there. With a little notoriety from his writing, he attracts the attention of a wealthy wife and moves to Africa where he lives an indolent life. In that book, Willie is established as someone too passive to seize on his own desires . . . and leads a shadow-like existence that doesn't please him.

In Magic Seeds, Willie has left Africa and finds himself as a temporary visitor in Berlin with his radicalized sister who wants him to return to India as a guerrilla fighter. While there, he realizes that revolutionary warfare is often more about the power lust of the revolutionaries than any potential benefit to those who they are supposed to be liberating. The resulting story is a scathing indictment of leftist revolutionary movements. After many years in the field, Willie turns himself in and is imprisoned. There, he finds that escaping the revolutionaries is almost as hard as ever . . . and his life still suffers from being too passive in the face of the resolve of others.

Unexpectedly released from prison, Willie returns to England and encounters the modern "civilized" world and finds it wanting as well. But Willie has started to grow up at last and begins to seize on initiative to get what he wants . . . and to learn from those who have been too greedy at following their impulses and ideologies. He even begins to see that there are times when being passive can be rewarding, and he begins to use passivity as a strategy to gain his ends. You also find out what happened to many of the characters who influence Willie in Half a Life.

The book's main weakness is that Mr. Naipaul is obsessed with the idea that people shouldn't be so easily swayed by others into making life-changing decisions based on limited information and spurious logic. They are looking for magic seeds that will lead them up Jack's beanstalk to slay a giant and gather up a hen that lays golden eggs. That's a silly search. There are no magic seeds. That theme is repeated and developed from every possible angle. The message overweighs the story so that this becomes more like a philosophical novel rather than a story-telling novel.

In Half a Life, Willie Chandran left his native India to pursue his education in England and found himself to be miserable there. With a little notoriety from his writing, he attracts the attention of a wealthy wife and moves to Africa where he lives an indolent life. In that book, Willie is established as someone too passive to seize on his own desires . . . and leads a shadow-like existence that doesn't please him.

In Magic Seeds, Willie has left Africa and finds himself as a temporary visitor in Berlin with his radicalized sister who wants him to return to India as a guerrilla fighter. While there, he realizes that revolutionary warfare is often more about the power lust of the revolutionaries than any potential benefit to those who they are supposed to be liberating. The resulting story is a scathing indictment of leftist revolutionary movements. After many years in the field, Willie turns himself in and is imprisoned. There, he finds that escaping the revolutionaries is almost as hard as ever . . . and his life still suffers from being too passive in the face of the resolve of others.

Unexpectedly released from prison, Willie returns to England and encounters the modern "civilized" world and finds it wanting as well. But Willie has started to grow up at last and begins to seize on initiative to get what he wants . . . and to learn from those who have been too greedy at following their impulses and ideologies. He even begins to see that there are times when being passive can be rewarding, and he begins to use passivity as a strategy to gain his ends. You also find out what happened to many of the characters who influence Willie in Half a Life.

The book's main weakness is that Mr. Naipaul is obsessed with the idea that people shouldn't be so easily swayed by others into making life-changing decisions based on limited information and spurious logic. They are looking for magic seeds that will lead them up Jack's beanstalk to slay a giant and gather up a hen that lays golden eggs. That's a silly search. There are no magic seeds. That theme is repeated and developed from every possible angle. The message overweighs the story so that this becomes more like a philosophical novel rather than a story-telling novel.