Finally a rainy, thundery day (there was no possibility of riding a bike this day) gave me the perfect chance to finish Naipaul's breakthrough novel A House for Mr Biswas. According to Wikipedia it took him three years to complete it, and it sometimes felt it would take me that long to read it.It's a long (600+ pages) and detailed account of the life of Mr Biswas, set in relation to all the generally ramshackle and overcrowded places he inhabited - to say he called them home would be inaccurate.
You've probably gained the correct impression I found this a bit of a slog. What kept me going, apart from a sense of duty to this blog and its handful of readers, was the occasional insight into the character of Biswas and his family, and into Trinidadian society, a dazzling mixture of cultures on the verge of decolonisation as the second world war presaged the collapse of the British empire. I suppose I can't avoid the word Dickensian, in that respect, but the plot is too linear to be gripping. There are no twists, just a procession of episodes, while Biswas's social and economic status remains more or less static. Perhaps that's the subversive point: we expect the hero of a novel (of this size) to develop and change, and Biswas just doesn't. The novel is peopled Dickensianly with a bewildering array of extended relatives, so much so that a list of characters would have been helpful. (I don't know why novelists don't do this. I suppose they think it's an insult to their story-telling prowess, or an insult to the reader's reading memory.) Naipaul has said "there was a short period, towards the end of the writing, when I do believe I knew all or much of the book by heart", and that shows. He doesn't give the little reminders of who's who that a more considerate writer would.
It's often funny, although very soon you realise the underlying bleakness isn't going to go away. The laughter is bittersweet. Linguistically it's sharp, with an enjoyable mix of registers and languages of the characters - sometimes Hindi, sometimes English (sometimes colonial, sometimes colloquial, gradually becoming more American) - giving some glimpse of the excitement and possibilities of a multi-lingual society and making the surface of the prose glittering and fun.
I'm not tempted to read any more fiction by Naipaul on the basis of this, though. I'm interested in the comments about his non-fiction and travel writing in that Wikipedia article and someday maybe I'll look into them.
