Half a Life (Paperback)

The offspring of a Brahmin functionary in a maharajah's court and an Untouchable woman, someone to whom his father was drawn temporarily in an effort to emulate the sacrifice of Gandhi, Willie belongs to neither group, an outsider even to the lowest caste. He escapes to England, where he remains an outsider, for his schooling and an early career as a writer, eventually fleeing again with Ana, a Portuguese-African woman, to her farm in Mozambique, where he lives for eighteen years. These are eighteen years in which he remains alienated, however, living half a life in a half-developed country to which he, apparently, is only half-committed.

The political and racial tensions of the novel--the bloody independence movement in India, the Notting Hill race riots in London, and the guerrilla movement for independence in Mozambique--are vivid and dramatic, paralleling Willie's personal conflicts. His early sexual encounters, which might have brought him some sense of belonging, are unfulfilling, however, laden with racial overtones and additional tensions, and described by Naipaul in startingly passionless and unerotic prose. And while the novel has a good deal of irony and some satire, it has no sense of lighthearted fun. Willie's need to belong is so intense it overpowers everything else. Though the reader may feel sympathy for him, his self-centeredness and lack of feeling for other alienated people, especially Ana, ultimately keep him at a distance him from everyone, including this reader.

Because Naipaul has mined the theme of displacement repeatedly in his novels and non-fiction, one cannot avoid wondering how much of this book is autobiographical. Though that probably shouldn't matter, it is a distraction here. The book feels more like the nonfictional summing-up of a life, in which the reader is an objective observer, than a liberating fictional journey into a new world which the reader shares equally with the author. Mary Whipple

What separates this book from many others I have read in the past by other authors is the way Naipaul describes the events which transpire during the lives of the various characters portrayed in the book through their very own eyes. You read in to the minds and thoughts of the main characters as if they've sat you down on a sofa and started telling you their personal life story.

The book manages to merge three distinct stories in to one, blurring the boundaries between each and providing a fitting link between the parts. As you move from one chapter to another, you can carry over the emotions and feelings slowly being built up by the main characters and connect with the despair and futility of life which they put across as you continue to read.

This story is not one to read if you're looking for laughs, but you may well find yourself oddly grinning as you interpret the awkward moments put across as you progress through the pages. Naipaul captures the ideal and also short comings of society in an exemplary way, though reframes from being antiseptically descriptive to the point of clean fact. You realise that this is indeed a story of fiction, not necessary fact.

The book had me turning pages to the very end and left me in one of those moods where I just said out loud, "damn" after reading the very last sustenance at the end of the book. It almost sets the scene for Half a Life 2, but why bother improving or extending a story which has already proven its point and peaked the imagination.....

Highly recommended if you're a first time reader of Naipaul's work. I certainly enjoyed it.