The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul

I had lived with the idea of change, had seen it as a constant, had seen a world in flux, had seen human life as a series of cycles that sometimes ran together. But philosophy failed me now. Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memoires. And this end of a cycle, and in the life of a manor, mixed up with the feeling of age which my illness was forcing on me, caused me grief.

For many years, V. S. Naipaul lived in (some kind of) caretaker's cottage on the grounds of a large manor in Salisbury, England, not far from Stonehenge. It was, as Naipaul describes it, a kind of permanence and stability after years of uncertainty and moving around; among other things The Enigma of Arrival describes in touching detail what it was like for a young man from Trinidad to move to England for the first time, a place which was represented in his imagination by the works of classic English literature, and also by the pictures of green fields dotted by dairy cows that appear on the cartons of milk children drank in Trinidad. That experience captures much of what Naipaul wrote about, the anxiety of Empire, of being unable to see either the colonized homeland or the imperial center well because one has been so trained in seeing the myths that regulate the relationship between them. Naipaul struggles, writes, moves back and forth between England, Trinidad, the U.S., and Canada. The manor in Salisbury, coming alongside literary success, gives the man an anchor in the world.

Much of what The Enigma of Arrival has to say, I think, is that such stability is essentially an illusion. The essays collected here are mostly in the pastoral mode, describing the life of the gardens, the fields, the hills, the woods of the manor and its environment. Naipaul is deeply interested in the lives of the lower- and middle-class workers who keep the manor going: caretaker Jack, the Phillipses, the gardener Pitton, the driver Bray. He learns that where he sees stability and continuity there is also change; few of these people have been at the manor any longer than he has and have little claim to its magisterial aesthetic or history. Some are sacked, some die--there is a strangely incommensurate story of an affair that leads to murder--and the sands of the manor shift beneath Naipaul. He, too, grows ill, and must face his own aging and the possible end of his life at the manor. Perhaps this is the enigma of arrival--that it keeps going on, keeps changing, that arrival as such never really comes.

I enjoyed this--Naipaul can really write. In this setting, his English inspirations are worn very openly. But I also found it difficult to penetrate the specific milieu of the English countryside he clearly loves; something about it seems too private, to personally experience, to really resonate. I liked most those images of the young Trinidadian seeing the world the first time from the air.