The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul

First published: 1987

Type of plot: Autobiographical

Time of work: 1950 to 1985

Locale: Wiltshire and London, England; Trinidad; New York City

Principal Characters:

• The writer, unnamed, a version of Naipaul himself
• Jack, the tenant of a cottage near the writer’s, the image of a fulfilled man
• Bray, a car-hire man
• The landlord, the reclusive invalid owner of the manor where the writer’s cottage is located
• Mr. Phillips, and
• Mrs. Phillips, the manor’s caretakers
• Pitton, the manor’s gardener

The Novel

The Enigma of Arrival is a meditative narrative of the discoveries and changing perceptions of its author as he lives for ten years at a cottage in rural Wiltshire, in England. Learning to see the countryside and its seasonal alterations, and discovering aspects of himself in the people he meets, the writer finds himself feeling a harmony with place that contrasts sharply with the dislocation and estrangement that have marked most of his previous life, both as a child in Trinidad and as a student and eventually a successful writer in England. For the first time, he is able to accept the realities of change and death.

The first of the novel’s five sections, “Jack’s Garden,” tells parts of the story of these ten years. Jack is a man the writer initially sees through his expectation that someone working in his garden in rural England is a figure deeply rooted in his landscape, an emanation of the countryside evoked by English literary tradition—and therefore someone quite unlike the writer himself, who, though he has been based in England for two decades, still feels a stranger there, still plagued by a rawness of his nerves. On the contrary, he learns, Jack has not always lived there. His garden is something he has created himself, his life there a conscious choice, his activities not “traditional or instinctive after all, but . . . part of Jack’s way.” Jack’s garden teaches the writer about the seasons, and Jack becomes an image of a man who has created fulfillment in the place to which he has come. The place is marked by change: Jack dies, new people move in, new farm managers carry out a scheme of drastic modernization, a worker on the new farm murders his wife, others die. Yet though he must learn the falseness of his early judgment that “in this historical part of England” everything was “a kind of perfection, perfectly evolved,” the writer is also able to feel that he has received the gift of “a second childhood of seeing and learning,” one in which he can see not so much decay and arbitrary loss as “flux and the constancy of change.”

The second section, “A Journey,” recalls first the writer’s initial “arrival” in England, an experience marked by suppressions rather than revelations of self, by blindnesses and ignorance rather than by sight and growing knowledge. As an aspiring writer convinced by his colonial education of the superiority of English culture, the teenager who left Trinidad with an Oxford scholarship clung adamantly to an image of the writer as aloof and knowing and to the writer’s “material” as metropolitan sophistication—the lives described by such novelists as Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley. Thus he buried all that embarrassed him, omitted painful experiences of race from his writer’s journal, and was unable to ask the questions that could have helped him connect with the lives of the people he met in his first London boardinghouse. Eventually he came to see that his “material” had in fact been there, in that boardinghouse, that “in 1950 in London I was at the beginning of that great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century.” The rest of “The Journey” traces his development as a writer, bringing him to the crisis that had overcome him shortly before his residency in Wiltshire—a crisis in which he had first believed himself to be sufficiently secure as a writer to leave the England in which he had never felt at home, only to realize that England was after all the location of his audience and his employment. As “Jack’s Garden” shows, he had now learned to see with his own eyes; he was ready for that second childhood.

“Ivy” and “Rooks” return to the Wiltshire experience and the writer’s deepening vision of five of its central characters: the landlord, managers, and gardener of the manor on which the writer’s cottage is located, and Bray, a car-hire man whose father had worked for the manor. “Rooks” ends with the illness that compelled the writer to move to a drier location. A conclusion, “The Ceremony of Farewell,” describes the Hindu ceremony that followed the death of his sister in Trinidad and the part these events played in the first phase of his writing of the novel.

The Characters

Though the writer considers one of the great benefits of his country life to be its “near-solitude,” and though the novel’s primary emphasis is on his inner life, the novel’s other main characters are, like Jack, significant figures in this inner life. Their presence is somewhat abstract: There is little dialogue; the landlord, like the writer himself, is unnamed, and the writer denotes the others only by surnames or given names, never by both. The line between the writer’s speculations about them and some more objective reality is often blurred, and the reader can frequently discern a mirroring in which aspects of a character are clues to the writer’s sense of himself.

The landlord is the character with whom this mirroring is most explicit. The writer sees both of them as figures of the end of empire. The manor the landlord inherited, now decaying, was the product in part of imperial wealth; the writer himself is heir to the experience of a people displaced by the needs of the British colonial economy (his forebears were brought from India to Trinidad in the nineteenth century to work on sugar plantations). The landlord, like the writer, has sought seclusion in the world of the manor. Unlike the writer, though, the landlord has been reduced by his inheritance to “non-doing and nullity”: He was an artist in his youth, but his art never developed; he no longer travels, even to London.

Four other characters are economically and symbolically connected with the landlord. Three of these the writer initially sees as “servants” of a traditional kind: Mr. and Mrs. Phillips, who take care of the manor and its invalid owner, and Pitton, the gardener. Yet the Phillipses are, the writer realizes, recently arrived and “rootless people,” essentially urban, doing a temporary job. Like Jack, they have a talent for making their lives. Pitton, the gardener, though also originating elsewhere, is more dependent and more rigid, as is sadly demonstrated when he is let go and cannot bear to look for another job; he has pretended through his dress and manner that he himself is a country gentleman.

Bray, the neighborhood car-hire man, defines himself by his lack of economic dependence on the landlord and sees himself as a “free man.” Like the Phillipses, he has made his own life, but unlike them and Pitton, he has always lived in the region, and in fact his father and grandfather were “in service” in the traditional way on the manor. Bray himself, moreover, is at the call of anyone who needs a taxi ride. The writer’s view of all four, preoccupied as he has been with his own issues of independence, becomes complex. He sees the Phillipses, Pitton, and Bray as “all in different ways in service’” at the same time that he observes their efforts to define themselves differently.

Critical Context

As a narrative intensely concerned with the process of writing, The Enigma of Arrival encompasses the writing of many of Naipaul’s other books. When he arrives in Wiltshire, the writer is working on a story about Africa, a story that must be a section of In a Free State (1971), a Booker Prize winner and one of several books that established Naipaul’s as an important voice. In “A Journey,” he tells how he initially found this voice by writing about the Trinidad street where he had spent part of his childhood (Miguel Street, 1959). With this writing, he says, “knowledge came to me rapidly. . . . my curiosity grew fast.” Two other works especially important in helping him understand his Trinidad origins were the much admired A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), based on his father’s life, and a history, The Loss of El Dorado (1969). These latter two books in particular seem to have given him the self-probing confidence and readiness to embrace a new world with which he endows the writer of The Enigma of Arrival.

During the period that The Enigma of Arrival describes, Naipaul was producing some his bleakest writing: In a Free State and A Bend in the River (1979), both of which draw terrifying pictures of the alienation produced by twentieth century migrations, and also Guerrillas (1975) and India: A Wounded Civilization (1977). The Enigma of Arrival marks a change in tone: The writing and feeling become gentler, more compassionate, hopeful, and open-ended. India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) and A Way in the World (1994) continue this new mode.

Although Naipaul dislikes such categorization, he is seen as a leading writer about the postcolonial world, its migrations and cultural dislocations. His writing has encompassed not only life in Trinidad and England (his subjects in The Enigma of Arrival) but also Africa, the Islamic world, the United States, and India. The Enigma of Arrival is a major work in its own right; moreover, in its subjectivity, it is brilliantly illuminating of its author’s more outward-turning explorations.

Bibliography

Célestin, Roger. From Cannibals to Radicals: Figures and Limits of Exoticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. A chapter on Naipaul explores his complication of Western discourse about “otherness.”

Jussawalla, Feroza, ed. Conversations with V. S. Naipaul. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997. A valuable collection of interviews with Naipaul. Includes a chronology and an index.

King, Bruce. V. S. Naipaul. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Surveys Naipaul’s work through 1990. Discusses The Enigma of Arrival as a revision of the modernist autobiographical novel and analyzes its structure.

Nixon, Rob. London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. A section on The Enigma of Arrival contrasts its gentle treatment of England with Naipaul’s harsh critiques of Third World societies.

Weiss, Timothy. On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V. S. Naipaul. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Chapter 8 analyzes The Enigma of Arrival’s themes and structure.