posted on 22 Nov 2018

A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul

Some of VS Naipaul’s later fiction is marred by the snobbish attitudes of the quasi-aristocratic English gentleman he sometimes seemed to think he had become. He was after all a Nobel laureate and a Sir. As he aged his politics became increasingly reactionary and his views on race and colonialism ever more controversial. It must also be said that personally he was something of a monster – as Patrick French’s astonishingly revealing biography makes clear.

And yet he still ranks as a great twentieth century prose stylist. His earliest novels are deceptively light, one might almost call them comedies of Caribbean manners, but even in these, Naipaul’s scrutinising gaze is turned on what would be his great themes – the suffering and the follies of colonial and post-colonial experience.

Many regard his greatest novel – his most Dickensian – to be A House for Mr Biswas, which with numerous detours I have been working my way towards for years. I still haven’t read it, however, and my focus right now is a rereading of what I think is amongst his most fully realised novels, A Bend in the River, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1979. It is a subtle but demanding book, rich in characterisation and overflowing with social and historical ideas.

The novel opens in 1960. Salim, its narrator, is a small business man of Arab background living on the east coast of an unnamed African country. A family friend sells Salim his shop – a trading post, almost – situated some miles inland, on a bend in a river, a site of trade and transit for centuries.

Salim buys the store on the river because as a younger man he found his neighbour’s accounts of life there touched with a near-European sophistication – proper Western meals in restaurants and imported French wines, the prospect of sexual relationships beyond what the local brothels offer. But he will come to realise that actual life there is very different and will learn to his cost that his own credulous regard for glamour is a dangerous delusion.

By focusing on the humdrum, anonymous existence of Salim and a small circle of friends, customers and occasional business contacts, Naipaul creates a microcosm of Africa and of the colonial and post-colonial experience. The town on the bend in the river was once an Arab town, a staging post for Arab slave traders marching their captives from the interior towards the eastern coast and the waiting slave ships. And then it became – briefly – an African town, lost in the bush, a huddle of hidden villages in clearings on meandering tributaries of the river. And in the colonial period it became a European settlement. But in 1960, the post-colonial period is beginning. After dreadful slaughter and a rage against the oppressors that would eradicate everything that reminded the local people of the shame of their oppression, peace is spreading, business is picking up and it is once again possible to travel the country without fear of violence, of sudden implacable outbursts of astonishing cruelty. An African president – the Big Man – is now in control following a military-backed coup.

The Big Man has controlled the army skillfully (albeit brutally) and is now as skillfully orchestrating popular sentiment. A new period of post-colonial development is underway – there is a property boom, a shift in favour of not just a new modern Africa, but a new modern African. The town on the bend in the river is on the way up. But this comes at a price. Shadowy political advisors, mercenaries and intelligence spooks throng the only good local hotel. The town gains a showcase government ‘Domain’ and a university, its cadre of lecturers and administrators made up of favoured academics close to the president. They are currently an intellectual elite, Salim senses, but shortly will become co-opted as functionaries of the regime – some more willingly than others – until such time as their services are no longer required or the Big Man’s strategies mean they must be dispensed with. And they will be.

What follows is often terrifying in its intensity – both in the sense of events spiralling out of control, and in its intensity of imagining. It will see the Big Man unleash a new wave of ‘radicalisation’ to purify the revolution and reinvigorate his regime – new cadres of youth militia (which in turn may need expunging), self-appointed moral guardians, and a near-Maoist cultural revolution ostensibly elevating African womanhood and peasant values – which will see Salim dispossessed of his business, brought down by his own greed and sexual appetites, and forced to flee for his life.

A Bend in the River is not an easy or a cheering read. In Naipaul’s analysis both the colonial oppressor and the oppressed seem equally culpable: the former of greed and racism and rapacity; the latter of gullibility, credulousness, of believing what Europeans say about post-colonial development and modernism. In Naipaul’s world, everyone – eventually – is consumed in one way or another by colonialism.

This is not a perfect book. It is perhaps thirty or so pages too long, and there is a longish episode concerning Salim’s rather brutal affair with the wife of favoured academic that to my mind adds little to the story. But it is a novel of undeniable power. Indeed, on rereading it I am convinced that A Bend in the River is Naipaul’s Heart of Darkness. It is his most baleful and unforgiving exploration of the post-colonial experience and central to his achievements as a novelist. Highly recommended.

 

Alun Severn

November 2018