A Bend in the River V.S. Naipaul

FROM THE BACK COVER

In the "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man—an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

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FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY PATRICK MARNHAM

A Bend in the River, published in 1979, presents a terrifying vision of life as it is lived in dark corners of the world, beyond the soporific blanket of western affluence. It is set in an imaginary country that strongly resembles the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the days of President Mobutu. In 1975 Naipaul had returned to Africa and travelled for three months through the land he had glimpsed on that short trip to the ruined towns of Rwanda. The Belgians had proposed a national identity for the people of the forest. Then, quite suddenly, they had left the Congo, and the embryo state they had abandoned, a complex instrument that nobody had been trained to operate, became an empty husk. The new orthodoxy of “Mobutuism”, or “authenticité” offered a way forward, a new security. Naipaul was unimpressed. The long essay he wrote after his visit, ‘A New King for the Congo’ opened with the words, “The Congo which used to be a Belgian colony, is now an African kingdom and is called Zaire. It appears to be a nonsense name….” In it he described Kisangani, formerly Stanleyville, with its decayed hotels and rusting iron barges. Stanleyville was the colonial town that had grown up on the site of Kurtz’s imaginary stockade in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This is the town which stands today in the centre of Africa on a huge bend in the Congo River and which is the original setting for both novels. In neither book is the country named. In Naipaul’s we are just given “the coast”, “the mountains”, “the forest”, and “the town in the interior at the bend in the great river”.

The story is woven in an intricate pattern that unfolds into three separate narratives. One is that of a colonised country that has been abandoned and is in a state of crisis. The history and politics of the town provide the framework for the lives of Naipaul’s characters but never descend into a polemic. The second narrative describes the daily lives of the town’s inhabitants, men and women enclosed within the heart of a country in crisis. The third deals specifically with the struggle of one character, the narrator Salim, to make sense of his unexpected predicament as a once bright future is destroyed by the surrounding chaos. He is re-living the nightmare of In a Free State but now organised on a much wider canvas divided into four parts.

In Part One, ‘The Second Rebellion’, the political instability that has spread up river from the capital is ended when the President employs white mercenaries to quell a rebellion. A measure of prosperity then returns to the town and Salim is able to reorganise his business. In the second part, ‘The New Domain’, he is invited to meet some of the town’s recently installed elite who are living in a purpose-built university quarter. In the third part, ‘The Big Man’, the policy of authenticité imposed by the President begins to unravel, and his followers realise that this has been built on lies. The concluding part is entitled simply ‘Battle”.

The opening pages describe Salim’s journey from the coast to the town, and his arrival, when he discovers that the place he was expecting to settle in has “ceased to exist”. Salim has been tricked. The friend who persuaded him to leave his own community on the East African coast and buy the dormant trading post set up on the river had failed to mention the town’s advanced state of decay. On his journey from the coast, as he gets closer to his destination Salim has a premonition of what awaits him. The road leading deeper into the forest passes through a disturbed region, between places “full of blood”. Salim thinks, ‘But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can’t be a new life at the end of this”. He can always buy his way in through successive frontier posts, but he has a strong sense that it will be more difficult to buy his way out.

Salim enters a town that has gone back to bush. Many of the houses have been stripped and then set alight, their European owners having long since fled. The swimming pools have been drained and only the rain water keeps their slime green. In the scrub surrounding the ruined buildings he can make out the concrete shells of what had once been restaurants and night clubs. It is a ghost town and Salim, wandering through it, feels like a ghost “not from the past but from the future”. His warehouse is standing but it is empty.

The town has a history, which is essentially the real history of Kisangani. Arab rulers in search of gold and slaves had come to that region for centuries before the Europeans. The bend in the river had been the meeting point between two competing forms of exploitation. The Arabs had come from the east, the Europeans from the Atlantic. Then the “Arabian energy that had pushed them into Africa had died down at its source, and their power was like the light of a star that travels on after the star itself has become dead…; at the bend in the river there had grown up a European, and not an Arab, town”.

It is this outpost of European civilisation that has in turn disappeared. Looking around at the desolation Salim ponders, “This piece of earth – how many changes had come to it! Forest at a bend in the river, a meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilization… and now this.” “This” is the next phase in the town’s history - a system based on lies. The town, with the rest of the country, is being misgoverned again, this time by the new ruler, the ‘Big Man’, who unable to continue the colonial project, and unable to return to the pre-colonial society, has decided to pretend that there is a third way, which he dubs “authenticité”. Salim arrives before the new regime has been imposed. He watches it grow in strength and then fall to pieces, “until the lies (the Big Man) started making us all live made the people confused and frightened and, when a fetish stronger than his was found, made them decide to put an end to it all and go back again to the beginning”. . . .