A review by Frank Birbalsingh

Out of twenty-five books so far, Half a Life is V.S. Naipaul's thirteenth work of fiction, with other titles devoted to history, biography and, most of all, travel writing. Since his birth in Trinidad in 1932, and his first book, The Mystic Masseur - a novel - in 1957, Naipaul has reaped universal literary acclaim, including the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001. His writing traverses his native West Indies as well as Africa, India, Latin America and England, where he has lived since 1950; and events in Half a Life also move from India to England, Africa and, briefly, Germany.
Chapter One of Half a Life supplies an outline by Willie Somerset Chandran's father about their family's high caste brahmin background in India, and the childhood both of Willie (named after Somerset Maugham, the English writer) and his sister Sarojini, followed by a third person narrative from the author of Willie's career as a student and writer in London in the 1950s, his meeting in London with Ana, an African woman with a white (Portuguese) grandfather, their move to an unnamed Portuguese colony in East Africa, evidently Mozambique, and the final, longest and most unusual narrative, by Willie himself, describing his earlier life with Ana in Mozambique, during that country's final colonial period of guerrilla warfare, and the collapse of Portuguese rule there in 1975.
On page 131, after he has arrived in Berlin at the end of his sojourn in Africa, Willie relates the story of his past life in Africa to Sarojini who has married a German and lives in Germany; but, unusually, his narrative stops abruptly, at the end of the novel, in the midst of recounting events from the middle period of his past life. Nor is this disjunction in the novel's structure either accidental or perfunctory: it deliberately confounds the linear sequence of ordinary events in order to capture the actual flux and change of real life. Earlier in the novel, during the episode of his life in London, Willie is told by Roger, a young lawyer who has read his stories: "I know your great namesake [Somerset Maugham] ...says that a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. But actually...Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end. Life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should all be there." Roger goes on to discuss the writing of Hemingway and even Shakespeare so far as narrative technique is concerned, all of which only confirms the emphasis Naipaul places on a disjointed, asymmetrical structure in Half a Life.
This type of structure illustrates essential features of the half life led by most if not all characters in the novel. Willie lives half a life in the sense that he is always dissatisfied. Sexual dissatisfaction is a fundamental concern, and he has to rely on the help of friends such as Percy Cato, a Jamaican with whose girlfriend – June - Willie has his first (dissatisfying) sexual experience. Then there is Serafina friend of his publisher Richard while, in Africa, in addition to his wife Ana, he consorts with: "the paid black girls of the places of pleasure" and has an affair with an estate manager's wife Graca whose mother was "a mixed race person of no fortune; her father was a second-rank Portuguese, born in the colony." Considerations of race only make Willie's reactions appear more rationalised and perhaps cynical rather than natural or plausible. Here, for instance, is how he interprets Graca's look when she first meets him: "as a man who had spent many hours in the warm cubicles of the places of pleasure. Sex comes to us in different ways; it alters us; and I suppose we carry the nature of our experience on our faces." Elsewhere, Willie also speaks of "my own sense of the brutality of the sexual life" And after admitting: "some half feeling of the inanity of my life," he feels: "the beginning of respect for the religious outlawing of sexual extremes." Such perfervid agonising over sexual frustration or longing, at least in Willie's case, is a powerful sign of his own half-lived life that implies continuous need for penance or retribution.
No matter what specific form it takes, the half-lived life seems to be an affliction as universal as original sin. Willie's own half-life partly originates in sexual failure, and partly from his displacement in Britain and Africa. His background helps him to understand : "that the world I had entered was only a half-and-half world [in Africa], that many of the people who were our friends considered themselves, deep down, people of second rank." Thus, for Willie, displacement is universal, not only is India displaced from the British empire, or Mozambique from Portuguese control, but it exists independently everywhere - within India, Britain, Mozambique and Portugal too. What is worse is that the half life caused by displacement requires penance, retribution or redemption that is unavailable. For example, although peace and normalcy are expected after the guerrilla war that ends in Portuguese withdrawal (displacement) from Mozambique: "There were services of a sort again. The great hardship was over. But just at this time there were rumours of a new, tribal war."
Willie faces unrelenting affliction from his half life. On the last page of the novel he admits: "the best part of my life has gone [at age forty-one], and I've done nothing." He blames Ana for living her life, but she confesses: "Perhaps it wasn't really my life either." Themes of radical displacement and an original sense of loss, exile and homelessness have plagued Naipaul throughout his literary career. The result is always grief that is ultimately beyond consolation or redemption, but made bearable when expressed in prose of such crystal clarity, pure simplicity and uncompromising, steadfast accuracy.