In V.S. Naipaul's last two books, plus In a Free State for which he won the Booker Prize, the publishers put the words "A Novel" on the covers. It was a case of protesting too much, because In a Free State consisted of two long short stories, a historical sketch and a travel piece, connected only thematically. Similarly, The Enigma of Arrival was largely a five-part autobiography and A Way in the World was a set of historical and autobiographical stories that could only be called a novel by stretching the term to breaking point.
So when Naipaul begins Beyond Belief by stating that "This is a book about people. It is not a book of opinion", I had the same feeling that he protesteth too much. By the end of the book, I hadn't changed my mind and Naipaul, I suspect, must have known he was being disingenuous. Even so, this doesn't change the strength of the ideas in the book. The stories just make Naipaul's opinions all the more convincing.
However, I found his ideas more interesting than the people whose stories he told. At no point did I get a sense of the persons he spoke to as living, breathing individuals with passions and fears and virtues and flaws. It is not that Naipaul does not describe these things. But everyone he meets is drawn in a sociopolitical context (as distinct from, for want of a better word, a psychological one) and this limits the characterisations which he did so well in earlier works such as Miguel Street.
But this, really, is just a quibble. So let me get another one out of the way while I'm on the subject: it seems that Naipaul is now too prestigious an author to have an editor. This must be why in Beyond Belief there is the repetition of simple details that it is an editor's job to find and correct. Within four pages, Naipaul mentions twice that two serving girls wore red and brown frocks respectively; that one of his interviewees studied in Minnesota; it takes him100 pages, however, to repeat the background description of how an airplane was built.
This uncharacteristic carelessness may have an unexpected advantage: it makes his prose far more readable. "I become again what I was at the beginning: a manager of narrative," he writes. While Beyond Belief has the usual Naipaulian precision, there is not that excruciating recording of details which, for me, makes a book like Enigma of Arrival difficult to read and A Bend in the River quite impossible. Beyond Belief in seemingly ordinary prose tells of ordinary lives dominated by a belief system which limits the human spirit in damaging ways.
Two theses underlie this book. The first is that "Always out there the United States, an unacknowledged part of the world picture of every kind of modern revolutionary: the country of law and rest...on whose goodwill he could throw himself."
In this regard, Naipaul in his travels through four Islamic countries - Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, and Pakistan - meets several highly-educated persons who do not perceive the contradictions of their beliefs and lives. One such persons is Shahbaz, a revolutionary, who admits that the war in Afghanistan led to worse conditions for the indigenous Baluchi people because of fundamentalist Pachans who came in. Naipaul notes that despite Shahbaz's realization of this and despite the part he played in the war, "...still he didn't feel responsible. Still he thought of himself as a carrier of the truth." The foundation of such an attitude Naipaul defines as follows: "Once the faith ruled, the conditions of the faithful didn't matter."
Throughout his book, Naipaul is always acutely aware of the human cost traditional Islamic culture imposes on people. "The Muslim pattern of multiple marriage and easy divorce...led to damaged families...to a kind of semi-orphaned society. A family abandoned by a father in order to start a second or a third: it was a story that came up again and again," he writes. In tandem, he records several instances of women abused and even murdered as a direct consequence of this patriarchal system. His restraint in these issues make the stories even more acute. Of one 23-year-old woman who married a man of her choice instead of the 13-year-old boy the head of the family wanted her to marry, Naipaul just states that she was kidnapped and murdered by her relatives. Of another, he says simply, "they brutalized her nose." It is this restrained and precise writing which makes the stories all too believable.
Naipaul's second thesis is that "Without writing, without a literature, the past constantly ate itself up...great conversions, of nations or cultures...occur when people have no idea of themselves, and have no means of understanding or retrieving their past." This lack is the root, in Naipaul's view, of the sociopolitical ills of all these countries, inasmuch as their people are all converts (not being Arabs) "Islam seeks as an article of faith to erase the past." It is an interesting idea, although one might argue that the technological competence that allows a country to have records of the past is what really prevents great conversions.
Although Naipaul's focus is Islam, many of his comments apply to all fanatics: "Religious or cultural purity is a fundamentalist fantasy," he says. Everything he writes about these Islamic nations is relevant to societies where fundamentalist groups have political influence; and Trinidad, which is referred several times, falls well within that ambit.
Copyright ©1998, Kevin Baldeosingh