Reluctant revolutionary

Willie CHANDRAN has been released from a prison term in India for involvement in a guerrilla group and deported to Britain through the efforts of an activist London lawyer. A super-rich banker, a dabbler in fashionable causes, invites him for a weekend at his country estate. Reminding him of the clothes snobbery of servants, the lawyer warns that they will unpack his modest suitcase. “It sounds like jail,” Willie says. “They’re always unpacking for you there.”

V.S. Naipaul, that desolate traveler, is at his most pungently morose in “Magic Seeds,” and he touches on a characteristic theme: The rot the First World has bred upon the Third -- the first part of the novel is a dismal portrait of Indian radicals -- it has also bred upon itself.

Moroseness would hardly seem the temper for a Nobel Prize winner. But Naipaul, a great writer though not always a good one, has often elevated it to a Swiftian intensity, as he did, for only one instance, in the stony darkness of “The Enigma of Arrival.” This underrated masterpiece imagines another immigrant -- largely the author -- in the wilderness of bedrock England.

Like other forms of negative capability, moroseness needs a great deal of artistic energy to hold its materials together. In “Magic Seeds,” a sort of sequel to the more vital “Half a Life,” it has dwindled to irritability, with the energy diminished. The themes and ideas are desultory, a pack of cards shuffled to the point of losing their snap and dealt out erratically in the course of what amounts to two different stories.

One of them, though it tends to alternate between the arranged and the perfunctory, has moments of piercing evocation as it follows Willie’s time in a hapless Indian underground. The other, indifferently slapdash, has Willie in London and, for the most part, up to almost nothing at all.

Goaded by his sister, Sarojimi, who lives a life of insulated idealism in Berlin, Willie has traveled to their native India to join a shadowy resistance group among the Tamils in the south. He’d been unhappy with his aimless existence, first as a mildly esteemed writer in London -- a single volume of short stories, fashionably praised -- and then for 18 idle and wealthily married years in Portuguese Africa.

Sarojimi had connected him with an underground movement led by a Gandhi-like rural activist. At least she thought she had. But the movement split, and her contact switched sides; when Willie arrives he finds himself, after long waits, bad food and much trudging, among a more violent group drawn not from the peasantry but from the urban middle class.

Psychopaths, his sister calls them when he writes her, unhelpfully warning him to be careful. In a chaotic jungle training camp, Willie has no idea how to go about doing that.

Over the next years he finds himself alternately estranged and involved as his leaders engage in a futile pattern of ill-prepared sorties and regroupings around a vast countryside. He is assigned to various superiors -- hard men, ostensibly, but by turns fierce, depressed and confiding. The movement is hopeless: miscellaneous tailings from the revolutionary lode of the 1960s. It wields ramshackle tactics and fragmented theories against a security establishment that is basically unthreatened, while dealing out an occasional lethal swat.

Meanwhile, the peasants in the villages the rebels occupy and abandon are wary and evasive. Ramachandra, one of Willie’s leaders, complains that at meetings they will agree their life is unjust but remain impervious when urged to act: “You can get them to clean out water tanks. You can get them to build roads. But you can’t get them to take over land. I begin to see why revolutions have to turn bloody. These people will begin to understand the revolution only when we start killing people.” He hasn’t the stomach for it, though: In despair, he goes out alone to brave a police ambush where he kills three and is gunned down.

Later, a cold Stalinist faction takes over with internal purges and a program to assassinate prosperous peasants. Willie is forced to pull a trigger; the scene is too abrupt and schematic to be convincing. The killing -- barely a sentence in a leisurely narrative -- suggests something that happens to this self-conscious observer, rather than something he does.

He surrenders to the authorities and, still the dilettante, expects amnesty. Instead, he draws a 10-year sentence in a fetid prison, from which his old London contacts eventually secure his release. Through diplomatic channels they portray him as the young hope (in his 40s) of Indian literature (that single volume, dating back 20 years).

Naipaul’s distrust of contemporary revolutions and revolutionaries has shown itself in a number of his books, “Guerrillas,” for instance. Willie’s story is a kind of coda, with the pitiful pretensions of the insurgents matched by his own vague floating confusions. And yet there are moments -- portraits of several melancholy rebels, an occasional lethal lapidary phrase -- that are memorable. Particularly, there is a depiction of the sights, manners and rhythms of an unchanging countryside. Traveling in the light of a late afternoon, with herds treading out the dirt paths, Willie arrives “at the hour of cowdust.”

The return to Britain is a miscellany of half-starts and worn-out disquiets. Getting a job, a portrait of the lawyer friend, a sluggish affair with the friend’s wife, a mixed-race wedding -- the episodes set out in all directions, and none shows any real zest to arrive. It is all tired, and tired of being tired, except in one mournful passage that allows weariness a graver universality. Willie walks among sights that once meant something to him: Now they are like picture postcards. To see the London of his youth thus diminished “was to strip it of memories and in this way to lose precious pieces of himself.” To the inconsolable, even memory is mortal. *