Naipaul's Passage -- `A Way In The World' A Revealing Triumph

The name alone is enough to make you curious: Leonard Side.

Early in V.S. Naipaul's haunting new book, he recalls a story about another native of Trinidad named Leonard Side, a man who had cobbled together a career as a cake decorator, flower arranger, and dresser of corpses at a local funeral parlor. Like Naipaul's, Side's ancestors had come from India, probably as indentured workers on the island's coffee, cocoa and sugar-cane plantations.

Though he is a Muslim - "a Mohammedan," in Naipaul's quaint phrasing - Side has on his bedroom wall a framed picture of Jesus Christ, "radiating light and gold, and lifting a finger of blessing." It is not so much an appreciation of another religion as it is a declaration of taste: It was Side's "idea of beauty," though it bordered on kitsch even in the Trinidad of a generation ago.

Naipaul is not surprised by Side's sense of art; rather, it is to be expected in the ethnic cauldron of the Caribbean. He notes that Leonard Side "would have had almost no idea of where he or his ancestors had come from. He wouldn't have guessed that the name Side might have been a version of Sayed, and that his grandfather or great-grandfather might have come from a Shia Muslim group in India."

Naipaul says he can't explain "the mystery of Leonard Side's inheritance," yet such mystery is at the heart of "A Way in the World" (Knopf, $23), his brilliant new meditation on history, memory and the human capacity for self-invention. It is his attempt to understand the "inheritance" that marked his own passage from childhood and youth in Trinidad, to Oxford as a scholarship student, to his career as a writer whose unmatched artistry is reflected in 22 works of fiction and nonfiction. It is a passage from anonymity to knighthood.

Part memoir, part fiction

Accordingly, "A Way in the World" is personal in tone, and Naipaul is touchingly candid about his callow youth and arduous apprenticeship. But he doesn't keep the focus on himself; rather, he sees himself as an inheritor of a complex Caribbean history with overlapping layers of ambition, violence and racial exploitation.

This approach gives the book its curious structure. Though it is identified as "a novel" on the title page, "A Way in the World" stretches that term out of easy recognition. Part memoir, part fiction and part historical re-creation, it includes extended portraits of Sir Walter Raleigh and a forgotten Venezuelan "revolutionary," Francisco Miranda.

One of the most telling episodes is about Lebrun, a communist intellectual and labor leader who played a supporting role in the 1937 oil-field strike in Trinidad. The strike served notice to Britain's colonial office that the aspirations of the island's black majority could not be long denied.

Though Naipaul left for Oxford in 1950, he saw Lebrun address a rally during a return visit when the black-power movement was sweeping the Caribbean. Eventually, he met the man in London after Lebrun published, in a Russian magazine, a thoughtful appreciation of Naipaul's early writings. Naipaul found a man adrift: "Lebrun was an impresario of revolution. . . . He had no base of his own, no popular following. He always had to attach himself to other leaders, simpler people more directly in touch with the simple people who had given them power. . . ."

Lebrun was emblematic of the first generation of educated Afro-Caribbean leaders who became "in-between people, too early, without status."

Naipaul adds: "They were shipwrecked men. They had lost touch with themselves and now, near the end, were seeing the fantasies they had lived on washed away. . . ."

Parallel to the past

The irony is that the futility of Lebrun's career mirrored the quixotic Raleigh nearly four centuries earlier and Miranda at the beginning of the 19th century. Naipaul casts Raleigh's story as a dialogue between the English explorer and his ship's surgeon, who sees through Raleigh's preposterous notion of El Dorado, a land of gold and diamonds, in the Venezuelan interior.

Aboard ship in the gulf between Trinidad and Venezuela, the old explorer is forced to accept the legacy of bloodshed - including his own son's death - spawned by his fantasies. He also must face the certainty of his own beheading by an irate British crown.

Miranda, a predecessor of Simon Bolivar, even more closely parallels Lebrun. Son of a wealthy Caracas merchant, Miranda chose a career in Spain's colonial army, only to desert after a few years and reinvent himself - with titles and ranks to fit the occasion - as a revolutionary seeking to throw the Spanish yoke off South America.

Ingratiating himself to leaders in the United States, France, Russia and England, he eventually mounted an "absurd one-ship invasion" of Venezuela in 1806, then languished a year in Trinidad before returning to his base in England.

Five years later, he returned with the ultimately successful Bolivar, only to run afoul of those true revolutionaries and spend his last years in prison. Finally, he realizes that "for all those years abroad I had been speaking only for myself. . . . It was what the Spaniards had always said, that my revolution was a personal enterprise."

Naipaul's superb achievement is to have woven together these disparate strands of history, personality, and motivation in a compelling narrative that reveals how they echo each other - and how his own life as an artist has been shaped by this tangled, violent legacy.

"We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves," he writes at the outset. Yet by the end of "A Way in the World," you feel that V.S. Naipaul has come to understand the naive would-be writer who so long ago set out from a colony for the wider world, feeling "unprotected . . . with no vision of the future, only with ambition." Donn Fry's column appears Sunday on the Books page of The Times.