V.S. Naipul, 'A Bend in the River' Reviewed

 

The plot of A Bend in the River follows the journey of Salim, a member of an Indian trading family, from the East coast of Africa to an unnamed town in an unknown African country.  He establishes himself as a merchant, and witnesses convulsions of tribal warfare and the establishment of an overbearing military regime.  Salim has a tortured love affair and friendships with other expats which expose the absurdity of the human condition.  The book is set in a bleak cosmology where decay and broken dreams are the nature of existence. Eruptions of cruelty sporadically occur without pattern or reason in an amoral world.  The arbitrary government and silent heavens do not bring happiness and prosperity, so the characters aspire to assign their own meaning and purpose to the life they eke out beside the Congo.   

However, Salim and others find no solace in their inner life. An entoptic nihilism infuses the inner reaches of the book.  Like bold visions of post-independence Africa, the subjective meanings of life that people adopt decay, and their idols deceive them.  Salim’s relationship with Yvette is the prime example of this.  When he meets her, she is a goddess in his eyes.  She is an emissary of a literary life and a culture almost synonymous with cultural superiority.  Salim is transfixed from his first meeting, and after their first encounter, he feels as he discovered a new plane of existence.  She imbued the entire town with an aureate glow of satisfaction.   

However, eventually Salim realises that not all was as it seemed.  From being held as a goddess, Salim learns more of her past and her own disappointments.  The reality is that she is a helpless figure, bound to the ghost-like Raymond in an unforgiving country.  Their relationship was not even a decline and fall, it was rather a decline into indifference.  Salim ends it without thinking too much about it.  Shorn of the former naval of his existence, and well aware that he should have left the Congo at the first warning signs of tyranny, he absent mindedly enters into an arranged marriage.  He is dull to the unjust seizure of his shop and his slide into servitude at the hands of Théo.  This is because his idols; Yvette and the Europe in Africa he once venerated were pale imitations of how he perceived them.  Numb to both the internal and external realities, he resigns himself to a loveless marriage.

The same existential detachment is present in Raymond.  He is truly less than a man.  He owes his position to Mobutu who clearly no longer needs him.  Initially presented as ‘the big man’s white man’, a mystical figure who knew more about the country than any other, it is clear that his work never amounted to anything substantial. Even Salim, the shopkeeper can see that his scholarship is one dimensional which never captured the sentiment of the event itself.  His history of the Congo will never see publication, and even if it did, it would not be the work he claimed it would be.  His commissioned work of propaganda was a shadow of what he described.  He is left waiting in vain for a call from the capital that will never come.  All that he can do is present a veneer of authority to his underlings, but anyone who knows him can see it is a thin veil.  He is obviously aware that Yvette is seeing Salim, but he accepts it without incident, even hosting Salim for dinner before he sleeps with his wife.  He lacks the ability, but most fundamentally the will, to effect active change.  He is detached from materiality, a spent shade haunting his study.  

 Naipul has come under much criticism for being neo-colonialist, and ‘infected by an ancestral communal resentment’ against blacks.  Cudjoe writes that the novel depicts ‘the gradual darkening of African society as it returns to its age-old condition of bush and blood’ and represents Naipul’s inability to understand postcolonial societies.  On the surface level these criticisms are entirely valid.  Europe is held as a world apart from the primeval forest of the Congo and the newly independent nation descends into a hellscape through tribal warfare and greed.  However, for me, the simplicity of his politics is precisely the point.  Naipul distances himself from the real Congo by refusing to call it that, just as he never refers to Mobutu by name nor denotes the colonisers.  The crude, one-dimensional portrayal of the town descending into bush and barbarism simply enacts the central existentialist ideas of decline and fall explored through the inner lives of the characters.  

If not a social commentary, what message does the book communicate? I don’t think it has one.  In Naipul’s cosmology, to do so would only see it slowly dim until consumed by the voracious bush.  Ferdinand’s final dialogue perfectly captures the spirit of the book: 

We’re all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning… It’s a nightmare – nowhere is safe now

It recalls the end of King Lear.  The sight of a good god was snuffed out with Gloucester’s eyes, and any possibility of a benevolent universe died with Cordelia.  On the blood-soaked battlefield, the exhausted survivors are left only with stony, unforgiving Edgar for a future vision.  Kent, just as indifferent as Salim, chooses to follow his king to the next world.  To do as stoic Salim does and indifferently accept a numbing fate is not a statement of ideals, but an observation of what many have no choice but to do.