A Bend in the River.

V.S. Naipaul is one of the most lauded novelists still living, a man whose legacy appears to have been carved in stone long ago and that is now impervious to reassessment. The Trinidadian-Indian author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, won the Booker Prize in 1971 for In a Free State, won the David Cohen Prize in 1993 (for an author’s entire body of work, limited to the English language), and several lesser prizes. His seriocomic novel A House for Mr. Biswas, which catapulted him to global literary fame, appeared on both the Modern Library list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century and the TIME list of the 100 best novels written in English from 1923 (the magazine’s founding) to 2005.

His 1979 novel A Bend in the River, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, also made the Modern Library list and the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written. Dispensing with the comedy of some of his earlier works, this novel instead paints an unflattering, inside picture of the brief rise of a newly independent African nation, but one that slides just as easily into despotism once the white authorities who provided the country’s power structure have left.

* I should mention that Naipaul’s longtime mistress Margaret Murray accused him of physically abusing her, and author Paul Theroux supported this and also wrote that Naipaul abused his wife but refused to divorce her. You can see letters from both in the New York Review of Books from 2009. Whether you can separate the man from his art is up to you.

The country of the book is never named, perhaps to keep the story generalizable to the dozens of newly formed nations in Africa of the 1960s as the white colonizers, having taken their fill of the country’s natural resources, departed the continent, sometimes with violence (Algeria, Belgian Congo), sometimes without. Naipaul’s narrator is Salim, an Indian Muslim in Africa, an outsider by caste who can observe the changes in the country in somewhat dispassionate fashion, although there are points in the novel where his difference from the majority of the population becomes or at least threatens to become an issue. The bend in the river of the title refers to the location of the small interior city where Salim lives, chosen for its advantageous geography for colonial traders, and thus a relic of a previous and dark era in the country’s history.

Salim is friends with several people who are deeply involved in the economy and/or the government of the new country, one of whom in particular becomes adviser to the leader who turns strongman as the novel progresses. Raymond, the adviser, becomes increasingly impotent even as the President – also called the Big Man – seizes more power, eventually creating a Hitler Youth-like group of young partisans while empowering the army to terrorize the people and plunder at will. It’s a familiar story drawn from dozens of real histories of newly independent nations that fell quickly into authoritarian rule because the white people left nothing behind – no institutions, no guidance, and an uneducated population unprepared for rule after years of forced ignorance from their colonial oppressors.

Naipaul couldn’t be clearer in his disdain for the colonizers and the mess they left behind, but he also seems to have little use or empathy for the populaces now under the thumbs of their new dictators, often men they supported and voted into power. The last section sees Salim traveling to London to see an old colleague, and it becomes clear that Salim is not long for his country, as Naipaul’s depiction has the new nation worse off under native leadership than it was under the white regime. Things did fall apart in many places, but there’s an underlying implication – or perhaps just my inference – that things were better under European rule, and I think that is, at best, an oversimplification.

The other issue with this book and with Mr. Biswas is that I couldn’t connect with the main characters. Biswas was a sad-sack type, born under a black cloud, but also prone to making really bad decisions that exacerbated his bad luck. Salim isn’t quite so unfortunate, running afoul of the authorities just once near the end of the book, but he’s inert as a character – the neutral narrator, involved in some of the action, but betraying none of his personality. If there’s a star in the book, it’s the town, not the people; you get glimpses of the haphazard growth of an interior city in a country that is simultaneously booming and collapsing. But that wasn’t enough to power me through the novel.

Next up: Maryn McKenna’s Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats