MAN BOOKER PRIZE 1971
Booker club: In a Free State
Looking back at the Booker: VS Naipaul
VS Naipaul deserves plenty of laurels, but whether In a Free State should be the prizewinner is harder to say
Sam Jordison
Friday 21 December 2007
The debates raging this year over the appointment of celebrities to prize committees and their stewardship by oleaginous former MPs seem all the more downmarket when considering who was on the 1971 Booker panel: John Fowles, Saul Bellow, Lady Antonia Fraser and Philip Toynbee with the respected critic John Gross as chair.
Perhaps, however, the experience of 1971 was enough to make the prize organisers think twice about including so many free-thinking intellectual heavyweights again. While Gross would cheerily describe the books he had to read as “rather a good lot”, Fowles, never one to mince his words said (probably more accurately): “Some of the publishers’ entries were insults to the judges and the others on their lists.” Bellow meanwhile declared that: “Five per cent were interesting,” and added: “For the rest it was like meeting virgins, who are neither wise nor foolish, but just bald.”
Most egregiously of all, and thus proving that the contemporary debate about whether the prize should go to the writer or the book (pace Ian McEwan and Amsterdam), Bellow also let slip that the prize had gone to: “the best writer, but not the best book.” He did so a full month before the prize was due to be officially announced, and, in fact, a week before the shortlist was even published.
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| Joking aside ... VS Naipaul. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian |
I’ve been unable to discover which book Bellow actually thought better than In A Free State, but that’s by-the-by. Perhaps the most striking thing about the statement is that everybody seems to have assumed from it that VS Naipaul was going to win, even though other contenders included Doris Lessing and Elizabeth Taylor.
The Trinidadian titan’s status in 1971 was especially high, before all those memoirs complaining about his all-elbows personality and after a remarkable decade of writing beginning with A House For Mr Biswas. This breakthrough comic masterpiece, still regarded as one of his best, had been produced at a price, however. The strain of writing it left him, he said, “a changed man”. He also noted sadly: “One has been damaged.”
That damage appears most starkly in his Booker winner. The good humour of his earlier books has been replaced by something harder and sharper, full of loathing and disgust. Something cruel even, although made all the sadder by Naipaul’s equally strong compassion.
Even in those early days a spot of minor controversy flared up because of the book’s being a story suite rather than one whole novel. Two short stories, One Out of Many and Tell Me Who to Kill, and the novella In A Free State are book-ended by two fragments of travel journal The Tramp At Piraeus and The Circus At Luxor. All concern different people and are in fact, set in very different places and even climates. All five are united, however, as studies of characters who are not in their native countries, of alienation, of racial tension and of sudden unpredictable shifts in power.
The Tramp At Piraeus is the literary equivalent of a maestro flexing his fingers, testing his theme with a few chords and melody lines before plunging into the main piece. It’s a profoundly uncomfortable description of the bullying of a mentally ill English tramp by two Libyans and a German on a ship sailing from Greece. One of the most exquisitely painful short pieces I have read for a long time, tense and tragic, with no word out of place and no word superfluous, it actually promises more than the rest of the book can deliver.
The two short stories One Out Of Many and Tell Me Who To Kill are impressive enough, but not so brilliantly realised. It’s possible for instance to detect inconsistencies of voice in Naipaul’s supposedly barely literate, but actually very learned sounding, protagonist in Tell Me Who To Kill. The final squib is equally discomfiting, but featuring as it does some stereotypically chic and heartless Italians and indistinguishable Chinese characters, it leaves something of a sour aftertaste.
The main chunk of the book, In A Free State, meanwhile, is a flawed masterpiece.
It’s easy to see why contemporary reviewers described this novella as a “Conradian tour de force”. Obsessed with savagery, cruelty, the human facility for violent sadism and unleashing horror, this story of a long drive to a place where there’s “nothing to do” undertaken by two British acquaintances in a former African colony, is a worthy heir to Heart Of Darkness.
Interestingly, although the writer has recently suggested he has no literary influences, at the time of writing he was happy to acknowledge a debt to Ibsen. There’s definitely something of the Scandinavian playwright in the intensity of the dialogue that the two travelling companions engage in, not to mention the air of doom that hangs over the whole.
There’s also plenty that is Naipaul’s own, however. He inhabits the minds of his protagonists totally and never flinches at unveiling their darker parts of their characters - the way they think “Africans” “stink”, their own self-hatred, their lack of purpose, the depths to which they will sink in order to survive. There are some superb set pieces (particularly an uncomfortable night in a hotel run by a colonel who bullies and rages at his native staff, but knows they will soon kill him). As the drive becomes a race against time and impending civil war, the tension is ratcheted up with accomplished skill.
On top of all that, of course, there is the exquisite prose.
It seems churlish then to complain about such a fine piece of writing. But I did have some grumbles. In contrast to his ability to lay bare the psychology of racism, Naipaul’s depiction of a homosexual is clumsy. Bobby, the male half of the dysfunctional lead duo, is something of a gay caricature. He’s arrogant, highly-strung, masochistic, full of “cunt” hatred and pathetically weak and needy when it comes to his “adventures” with local men. The portrayals of these “natives” meanwhile, may well be deliberately wafer-thin, presumably in order to reflect the way the Europeans view them, but they remain correspondingly unsatisfying. Finally, there’s an intangible quality missing that makes it hard to warm to this book, in spite of its dazzling prose. As Naipaul’s sometime editor Diana Athill said of the bulk of his later works, “they impress, but they do not charm.”
There’s no doubt, pace Bellow, that Naipaul deserves a Booker. Whether this is the right work for the award, however, is another question...
THE GUARDIAN
Man Booker Prize
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