Mistaken Identities

...His essential negativity as a character means, in narrative terms, that he is a magnet for the stories of others, and Magic Seeds, following on Haifa Life, forms an extended novel of ideas in which we observe the aimlessness of lives lacking an overarching myth...

...ANITA Desai's new novel, The Zigzag Way (Houghton Mifflin, 157 pp., $23.00), is similarly concerned with the search for spiritual wholeness through background and history...

...There are, as Sarojini has told Willie at the beginning of the novel, two worlds: "One world was ordered, settled, its wars fought...

...Precariously clinging to their place on what Roger calls the social "beanstalk" of London life, they are fully conscious of the countless little humiliations and deceptions that the maintenance of upper-middle-class style requires of them...

...Roger and Perdita are part of the ordered, settled world, but their dissatisfaction—their awareness, that is, of their own shoddiness, and of their lives' lack of myth, purpose or meaning—shows that the kind of wholeness Willie keeps seeking is a complicated matter...

...he meets with a subclass of villagers who have been exploited and malnourished for so many centuries that they are physically diminished—"Cricket people, matchstick people...

...In the other world people were more frantic...

...Reading Gandhi's autobiography for the first time, Willie gets a glimmering of a revolution that might really have been his, and a history he might once have connected with...

...All of our stories, these writers imply, reach back into a past we no longer understand...

...They looked at television and found their community...

...Her command of written English and Spanish is too poor for her to contribute to the scholarly work she claims to scorn—or, as Desai puts it, "The books they read in the library...

...Rabbitlike, these wriggled free...

...they were clearly "seeking in various ways to revenge themselves upon the world...

...I wish this healing book had come my way 25 years ago__I would have aimed at another life...

...They were desperate to enjoy the simpler, ordered world...

...Seeing the city, as he has seen India, through the eyes of a revenant, he ponders his younger self and the lack of a coherent philosophy that led him into dead ends, while realizing that at his age—50, by now—any attempt to change the meandering course of his life is probably doomed...

...For some time, however, he has worked desultorily and without real interest, keeping up a facade for the sake of his girlfriend Em, a serious and singleminded scholar...

...and they counted their money...

...In Africa he had been an observer of other people's wars...

...The pattern we seek is there—for those with the imagination and instinct to grasp it...

...Though I am a man rescued and physically free and sound in mind and limb," he says, "I am also like a man serving an endless prison sentence...

...I don't have the philosophy to cope...

...The free, adventurous spirit of someone like Betty lives on, finding echoes in landscapes, in flowers, in faint but real memories...

...Desai's tale is a joyful one, while Naipaul's is gloomier and more questioning, as is his wont...

...The leisurely pace of Magic Seeds leads one to think there will be yet another installment in Willie Chandran's story, and so does Willie's mental condition at the end: He is still as lost as he was during his futile revolutionary years...

...Naipaul, the poster boy for multicultural, postcolonial alienation, has written about this subject many times...

...A whole community, a little slice of gray, Protestant, working-class Cornwall sprang up, an alien island in this timeless, sunbaked country...

...Now in Magic Seeds (Knopf, 280 pp., $25.00), which picks up Willie's story after his departure from Africa in the wake of his colony's bloody battle for independence, we find him further than ever "from his own history and...

...Thus when Desai makes her final narrative zigzag, it is no surprise that it twists backward in time—back down the proverbial ladder into the past—to the days when the mines flourished and Eric's grandparents, Davie and Betty Rowse, lived on the sierra...

...as the bleakness of the surrounding quarries, the nearby red-brick chapel, and the need to economize___Itwaswhat the child would grow up with, an austerity like a chill in the blood...

...In his early 40s by this time, Willie drifts to Berlin to visit his sister Sarojini...

...It is through the eyes of Betty and her grandson Eric, both innocent provincials, that Desai's descriptions of Mexico are the most vivid...

...Lacking any moral certitude of his own, he lets himself be led by the more positive Sarojini into returning to India to join a revolutionary movement with the ostensible purpose of liberating the lower castes...

...the revolution is beginning...

...now Sarojini provides him with one of his own to fight...

...they ate and drank approved things...

...She had left it to others to write them.'' A more embarrassing secret is that she is unable to communicate verbally with the Huichol, being ignorant of their language...

...I would have felt that I wasn't alone in the world, that a great man had been there before me...

...Eric and his father are both heirs to this spirit...

...Many, or most, find this in religion...

...In this world without war or real danger people had been simplified...

...They would see themselves living in a new and rich area in a modem concrete block with an elevator...

...Though Dona Vera's love for the Huichols is theatrical and opportunistic, it is also real...

...Early in life she left her husband for the solitude of the mountains and the abandoned mines to commune with nature and with the local Huichol Indians...

...The room service menu in the hotel promises delicacies "'from our baker's basket' and 'from the fisherman's net' and 'from the butcher's block,'" but "Willie knew that it had no meaning, that it had all been copied from some foreign hotel, and was to be taken only as a gesture of goodwill, a wish to please, an aspect of being modern...

...Eric's taste for research, nearly defeated by his dull dissertation, reasserts itself as a newfound need to find the traces his own family left on Mexico two generations earlier...

...to Eric, of the mysterious lives his grandparents once lived there...

...Revolution becomes an exercise of power rather than an extension of sympathy...

...The beauty of this book is that such austerity never quite triumphs...

...The hapless Cornish miners find themselves in the middle of a war they cannot fight...

...One of the most important of those ideas was that in India there were servile races, people born to be slaves, and there were martial races___You and I belong to the servile races...

...the more ebullient and curious Betty questions Cornish habits and prejudices as she opens her eyes to the New World...

...The Cornish presence in Mexico, though, is not only anomalous but doomed...

...Their wartime departure is dramatic...

...Porfirio Diaz' mass sales of mineral concessions to Americans spark outrage all over the country...

...Her apotheosis is reminiscent of a number of lady lions of the last century: Georgia O'Keeffe, Isak Dinesen and, most specifically, Mabel Dodge Luhan...

...But while they stayed outside a hundred loyalties, the residue of old history tied them down...

...Despite her pose as the Huichols' greatest friend—and her genuine affection for them—her fortune derives from the exploitation of their land...

...a hundred little wars filled them with hate and dissipated their energies...

...Betty dies during the hurried flight and her infant son, Eric's father, is raised without her lighthearted presence—back in Cornwall, where "the air of self-sacrifice and duty was as palpable...

...Francisco Madera, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa are on the move...

...For others the pattern has to be imposed if it is not readily apparent...

...Most novels of 280 pages are necessarily taut...

...Naipaul's genius—that is not too strong a term—shows in his ability to present us with so very much in a few well-chosen words, as Willie sinks back into old sights and smells...

...He then returns with Roger to London, where the second half of the novel takes place...

...Over this great field of volcanic rock from the rums of the Aztec temples, the tricolor of Mexico whipped like a dragon in the wind from the mountains that ringed the city and were visible at the end of every avenue and street, benevolent and protective witches wrapped in dark skirts...

...I wouldn't have lived that shabby life in Africa among strangers...

...A graduate student in history, he has spent several years on a dissertation about United States immigration patterns...

...She knows that by attracting tourists and scholars to their territory she has cheapened their existence and her own...

...Even the dreadful Dona Vera is touched by moments of true exaltation, as opposed to the theatrical, almost theoretical exaltation she preaches to her acolytes...

...So when Em goes to Mexico to pursue her research "in the field," Eric decides to tag along...

...They are toadies to their social superiors and mentally isolated from the lower classes...

...from the ideas of himself that might have come to him with that history...

...But both authors illustrate a contention that each of us is more, much more, than the apparent sums of our different lives...

...But her disapproval cannot quite "cast down Eric's spirits...

...He observes "the white, melancholy light" that denies beauty and human possibility...

...He needs to understand his own history, she tells him: "All the history you and people like you know about yourself comes from a British textbook written by a 19th-century English inspector of schools in India called Roper Lethbridge___It gave us many of the ideas we still have about ourselves...

...In pursuit of more knowledge he travels to the site, fetching up at the famous Hacienda de la Soledad...

...Instead, I was reading Hemingway, who was very far away from me, who had nothing to offer me, and doing my bogus stories...

...Desai's skill, and her heart, are evident in the way she is able to take this rather despicable character and give her depth and humanity...

...The ruined mines near the Hacienda are a perpetual reminder: to Dona Vera, of her despised husband and his rich family, and of her part in the despoliation of the area...

...He is exposed to what he calls "human nullity" in all its forms...

...The searcher, in this case, is Eric Rowse, a young American as aimless as Willie but far lighter in spirit...

...he is in a movement controlled by maniacs and dedicated to the Stalinist principles of murder and class liquidation...

...were not written by her...

...Em, purpose-driven as always, hardly seems to see the surroundings that enchant him, and her puritan soul deplores his "capacity for enjoying idleness...

...Our ancestors still live within us, Desai implies, in images and smells and colors as well as in more tangible physical and mental characteristics...

...Having lived all his life in New England, Eric finds Mexico City a revelation...

...Willie becomes a receptacle and a mirror for Roger, listening to him closely as he has listened to Sarojini and to the various revolutionaries in India...

...It was as though he had been starving throughout his northern existence and now, reborn a traveler, could feast and gourmandize without restraint...

...The young person "trying to find himself," the older one attempting to weave the varied and frequently clashing strands of a long life into a harmonious ensemble—both are on a universal quest for purpose and spiritual wholeness...

...The ancient Chinese, she tells us, "believed time is not a ladder one ascends into the future but a ladder one descends into the past"—a motto Naipaul would probably concur with...

...Willie ends up in prison and is eventually liberated by Roger, a lawyer friend from his early days in London...

...His father had been born in Mexico, where his grandfather, a Cornish miner, worked in a silver mine before World War I. That, and the location of the mine high on the sierra several hours from the city, is all Eric knows...

...In the first of a series of masterful segues (or perhaps "zigzags," to echo the book's title, would be a better word), Desai moves seamlessly from Eric's story to Doña Vera's...

...Davie, a serious, plodding figure, accepts the conventions of home, outlandish as they seem now in Mexico...

...Likewise the elevator shaft in his revolutionary contact's apartment block: It is badly constructed and misshapen, but it is "an elevator shaft nonetheless: That is how the people living in this block would see it...

...With poignant futility, they seek to infuse directionless lives in exile with the purpose and harmony they believe their village ancestors knew...

...His characters, whether in sordid London digs or adrift in the wide expanses of Africa, are often uprooted from impoverished societies...

...The old woman is imperious and disdainful, a true monarch of her little kingdom, who mocks the niggling pedantry of visiting scholars and patronizes the tame Huichols who live in the Hacienda, sit at the foot of the table, and accept her largess...

...Now it is too late...

...A native Viennese, she collaborated with the Nazis and had to flee in 1945...

...It is doubtful whether he will ever achieve that philosophy, but at the conclusion of Magic Seeds he is left hanging in a way that Naipaul, the meticulous craftsman, can only have intended to signal that Willie Chandran will appear again...

...His comrades are driven not by idealism but by their own warped, misspent lives, and he "wondered what weakness or failure had caused them in mid-life to leave the outer world and to enterthis strange chamber...

...Returning to India for the first time in 20 years, Willie is immersed once more in the familiar yet always elusive essence of his native land...

...In the airplane memories crowd in on him: "The terrible India of Indian family life—the soft physiques, the way of eating, the ways of speech, the idea of the father, the idea of the mother, the crinkled, much-used plastic shop bags (sometimes with a long irrelevant printed name)—this India began to assault him___" The ceiling fans in the airport are "furry with oil and sifted dust...

...His assumption of new identities each time the old ones failed cost him a knowledge of his true self and gave him, as he came slowly to realize, only "half a life...

...The Rowses were part of a large influx of Cornish miners who came to Mexico when the tin mines of their own land went out of business...

...In Naipaul's 2001 novel Haifa Life, Willie Somerset Chandran (the irony of his name will not be lost on Naipaul's readers) left behind an unhappy youth in India to make his home first in London, then in a Portuguese colony of Africa...

...The prospect provided by Roger and his wife, Perdita, is not inspiring...

...This is the domain of a redoubtable old woman, Doña Vera, whose fortune came from the mines that had once belonged to her husband's family...

...Yet rather than inspiring revolutionary thoughts, these sights make him understand revolution as nullity too...

...Over the years she has become a legend, the "Queen of the Sierra,'' revered as a mystical link between the corrupt white world and the supposedly natural world of the Huichols...

...Naipaul is unmatched in his ability to convey such touches of pathos without the slightest hint of sentimentality, and as Willie, under the control of his new revolutionary bosses, descends through India's social strata to the very bottom, there are plenty of opportunities for sentiment...

...Doña Vera, it turns out, is a colossal fraud...

...and went out to meet the city, a city that strewed its sights before him as a carpet seller might his carpets, a jeweler his gems___ Eric could not have enough of it...

...Willie Chandran, one feels, is what Naipaul himself might have become without the great talent that lifted him above thousands of other rootless and aspiring young men...