A fine tale of failure

A man recounts the story of his life of failure and fear to his son. In time, that son also finds himself outlining his experiences to his sister - but not before a vivid and at times comic tale of an outsider abroad in a London of exiles and later among a post-colonial set, unfolds. Naipaul's first novel in seven years is also his finest since his magnificent The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and could also stand shoulder to shoulder with his Booker-winning In A Free State (1971) and A Bend in the River (1979).

Throughout his career, Naipaul has addressed issues of nationality and identity. This new book may seem smaller in scale because his central protagonist, the self- absorbed but redeemably human Willie Chandran, is involved in a personal quest for fulfilment. Yet the melancholic, confessional tone of both narratives express volumes on the struggle to live within that most difficult of contexts, with oneself. It takes as its major theme that twilight zone suggested by the title, that of living life as mere existence and little more.

This is a relentless but subtle book, and indeed initially appears almost too subtle. Naipaul even risks alienating the reader by allowing Willie to appear cold, unsympathetic and unforgiving - "I despise you" he says to his admittedly weak but honest father.

Old Mr Chandran, a temple worker, describes his days as a holy man in pre-independence India, and a strange time in which a self-imposed vow of silence had earned him an undeserved reputation for spirituality. "This had won me a certain amount of local respect, even renown. People would come and look at me being silent and some would bring me gifts."

This false position was helped by the fact the famous writer Somerset Maugham had visited the temple and was impressed by what the novelist saw as the silent man's serenity. Maugham wrote about his visit to India, making Chandran senior famous abroad and eventually accepted at home. In fact, Chandran's apparent holiness was inspired by a desperate need to make amends for various offences he had committed.

The chance visit and the fame that followed rehabilitated the bogus holy man who had never lost sight of being a sinner. He explains to his son, Willie, whose middle name is Somerset, how he had become a mendicant living in the outer courtyard in the first place. Angered by his relative security as the grandson of a fleeing priest who had become a clerk and whose son - his father - had fallen into that life, Chandran senior began to sense "some little imp of rebellion in me". Although the India of his youth "was full of politics", the maharaja's state in which the family live was cut off from all such action.

Chandran senior explains how his future had been set out for him. "The plan was that I should get a BA degree and then perhaps get a scholarship from the maharaja to do medicine or engineering. Then I was to marry the daughter of the principal of the maharaja's college. All of that was settled. I let it happen, but felt detached from it. I became idler and idler at the university." The candour of the older man's confession is compelling. Naipaul convinces us that here is a father telling his son the truth of his own mistakes in order to prevent history repeating itself. The father's sense of confusion recalled is palpable as he explains how he rejected the life mapped out for him and, ironically, returned to the temple world his grandfather had fled.

At the heart of his revolt was the decision to "turn my back on our ancestry, the foolish, foreign-ruled starveling priests my grandfather had told me about, to turn my back on all my father's foolish hopes for me as someone high in the maharaja's service, all the foolish hopes of the college principal to have me marry his daughter". Freedom for him seemed attainable by doing the "only noble thing that lay in my power" - marrying the lowest person he could find.

Through this, Naipaul gives some sense of the racial and social politics of the caste system. Chandran senior sought out an unattractive girl also at the university who was "almost tribal in appearance" and belonged to the caste known as "the backwards". He wooed her silently and eventually set her up in a room of her own. "It was her idea."

The father's story proves an oddly touching, pathetic tragedy of self-disgust. Though never marrying the "backward", he fails in his vow of sexual abstinence and two children are born, Willie and a daughter.

The father's story acts as a cautionary prologue to the main story. The vivid middle section narrated by a detached third person voice, is dominated by energy and frustration. Having left India, Willie, the mission school- educated boy who had once nursed dreams of becoming a missionary, arrives in London. The outsider's vision of a society to which he can never fully belong is brilliantly drawn by Naipaul who conveys Willie's envy and fear with a subtle balance that never quite allows him to become a comic character. Surrounded by other outsiders drawn to this white English world, a series of tests, largely sexual, confront the newcomer. The prose is marked by Naipaul's characteristic measured grace.

As a writer he has long been shaped by the influence of Conrad and that master's feel for the quality of the writer as detached witness. Even when at his most autobiographical, Naipaul retains that elegant detachment. One sequence deals with Willie's first faltering steps into the world of writing. His vulnerability is at first countered by his ego.

Meanwhile, as a man, Willie becomes a clumsy sexual predator, intent on sleeping with women already involved with his friends. The brutality of the sex is explained to him. Naipaul evokes the promiscuity of late 1950s- and early 1960s-London as experienced by Willie's circle of fellow drifters and party-goers.

At one of these gatherings, a veteran old-style editor from the North of England reads his obituary, a lament for his wasted life, aloud to the guests. It is a dramatic moment in a novel of quiet drama. Willie blunders on, experiencing and desiring and remaining disconnected until he is saved by a woman who appears to be the only reader to have understood the small book he has succeeded in having quietly published - and poorly reviewed.

Ana, the saviour, introduces him to another post colonial world. In time, she suffers the fate of most saviours, while Willie in telling his story delivers a de-culturalised variation of his father's fall from aspiration.

Regret is the prevailing emotion of Half A Life. Most of the characters are searching and seeking. This is an extraordinary performance made memorable by its wisdom, polite bitterness and irony. Willie's journey towards "the brutality of the sexual life" is both quest and elegy for the failure of culture and tradition as well as dreams.

Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times