Nobel winner an unrewarding read

The Nobel Prize for Literature appears to be awarded for a lifetime's achievement rather than on an evaluation of current form. V.S.Naipaul's new novel, published a month before he was announced as this past year's Nobel laureate, certainly wouldn't strike most people as worthy of any prize at all.

The story begins in India in the 1940s, at the time of the struggle for independence. A minor Brahmin official has decided to follow Gandhi's lead and burn his Western books, opting instead for a life of silence in a temple. He is seen there by Somerset Maugham, in India to research material for his novel The Razor's Edge. The former official consequently gives his son "Somerset" as a middle name.

This youth wins a scholarship to study in London in the 1950s, arriving at the time of the Suez Crisis. There he meets literary people, writes scripts for the BBC, and begins to write fiction. A collection of his short stories is published. Then he pairs up with a woman, Ana, who has written him a fan letter, and accompanies her to her home in the Portuguese African colony that was eventually to become Mozambique.

But after 18 years he leaves her, and goes to Berlin where his sister, who has married a German photographer harboring Marxist ideas, is living. Then follows a long flash-back to life in Portuguese Africa, and when you reach the moment when the narrator tells Ana he wants to leave her for the second time, the novel ends.

The problem with this book is that much of it makes for yawningly boring reading. Nothing dazzles, nothing leaps off the page and hits you between the eyes. Naipaul seems to be resting on his laurels, penning a random tale that incorporates his old autobiographical themes of exile and rootlessness, self-fashioning and willpower. The three sections -- India, London, Africa -- fail to coalesce. The characters never really come to life, and the prose gives the feeling that it was created with difficulty.

Paul Theroux's incisive and exceptionally intelligent book on Naipaul, Sir Vidia's Shadow, came out four years ago, after Naipaul had -- allegedly on the insistence of his new, second wife -- broken all contact with Theroux after 30 years of friendship. Theroux had sensed something was wrong when he saw some of the inscribed first editions of his books, that he had given Naipaul, in a bookseller's catalogue.

In his damning, but very convincing, conclusion to that book, Theroux says that in recent years he has found himself skipping pages in Naipaul's work. And if this new novel is typical, it's certainly true that the fire that characterized books like An Area of Darkness is burning low these days.

Theroux's is an alert, honest and enormously entertaining book. In it, he comes to the conclusion that his former friend's mind is profoundly and irreversibly Indian in all its most important assumptions. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, unless you labor under the misapprehension that you're something else, an English gentleman, perhaps, or an international world sage. But, Theroux claimed, Naipaul had learned virtually nothing about the English, even after living half his life in the UK. His understanding of Islam, too, was superficial (despite having written two books on the world's Muslim countries), and his perceptions of Africa -- a place Theroux knows well -- fundamentally skewed.