The version of In a Free State which won the 1971 Booker prize consists of a framing narrative and three short stories – “One out of Many,” “Tell Me Who to Kill,” and the title story, “In a Free State.” In his introduction to the edition of the novel that I have just read, Naipaul explains that he was originally advised by his editor to publish just the core narrative as a stand-alone novella, without the supporting stories and text, but how at the time he over-rode her advice, and obviously felt vindicated given the Booker award. However, he goes on to say that he eventually came to realise that her advice was correct. In a Free State is now published on its own without the supporting text, and that was the version I read for this review. Part of me thinks that might constitute taking a short cut, and that I ought to go back and read the longer, prize-winning version, but that would be sadistic. The stand-alone version works fine.

In a Free State is set in an unnamed African country that has recently acquired independence from a colonial power. The king has been deposed in an ongoing coup, with the President about to take power. The king and the President are from different tribes, and the delicate balance of power introduced by the colonial government has started to collapse almost immediately after independence.

The narrative is told by Bobby, a Government official. We are never told his role or status, but we are led to understand that he is white and has decided for now to remain in the country. He has been attending a conference in the capital city in the north of the country, the President’s power-base, and he plans to drive back to the south where the King is based. He offers a lift to Linda, the wife of a colleague, who wants to make the same journey.

The night before the journey begins Bobby tries to pick up a young man in the hotel bar. The bartering over price goes badly, and the young man spits in his face. This is a disturbing scene: Bobby has obviously been comfortable paying for sex before now, when his role in Government gave him a position of authority, but now his status is beginning to slip:

“Bobby thought: this boy is a whore. Bobby was nervous of African whores in hotel bars. But he was prepared to bargain. He said

“You are a brave man. Going about with all that cash. I never carry more than sixty or eight shillings on me.”

“You need two hundred to do anything in this town”.

“A hundred at the outside is enough for me”.

The rest of the novella is a traditional road journey across the divided country, with strong echoes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. While the Conrad novella is a portrait of a primitive Africa in the early stages of colonialisation, In a Free State is set at the end of Empire. The novel is dominated by images of the decay of the ‘civilisation’ that the white settlers have constructed. The landscape is reclaiming the towns and settlements built by the Europeans and reverting to a more ‘natural’ state, reversing the process of colonisation:

Many of the houses that looked abandoned were occupied, by Africans who had come in from the forest and had used the awkward, angular objects they had found, walls, doors, windows, furniture, to re-create the shelter of the round forest hut. Within drawing-rooms they had built shelters; they had raised roofs on verandah half-walls. Fires burned on pieces of corrugated iron; bricks were the cooking stones.. ..On the sidewalk grass had grown around rubbish from the houses, things that couldn’t be used and had been thrown out: cracked squares of picture glass, fragments of upholstered chairs, mattresses that had been disembowelled for their springs, books and magazines whose pages had stuck together in solid, crinkled pads.

The 2001 Nobel Committee described Naipaul as “Conrad’s heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings…His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished”. I’m struggling to relate this comment to In a Free State, which is dominated by the voices and perspectives of the white settlers, with the black characters often sullenly mute, or saying what they are ordered to say. The central characters’ attitudes towards the African people they meet are consistently negative; they are nameless, mostly fat, and there are persistent references to how they “stink,” and smell like “rotting vegetation.” That in itself doesn’t invalidate the novel – what Empire does to the imperialists is something worth exploring – but it doesn’t feel like a history of the vanquished.

Bobby is a unlikeable character. His recent experience of mental illness is mentioned but not explained – as a representative of the colonial power I read this as suggesting that colonialism itself is sick. It is possible that Naipaul intended the same suggestion by making Bobby gay (there is one bizarre episode where he is repulsed by the concept of a vaginal deodorant!). Midway through their increasingly difficult journey Bobby and Linda, (such bland European names) spend the night at a hotel run by a colonel who treats his African servants like slaves. The hotel was built to attract European tourists to the area, and is in an obvious and accelerating state of decay, with only muddy water coming out of the taps. (The echoes of these scenes with J G Farrell’s Troubles, another portrait of a military figure trapped in a decaying hotel at the end of Empire, are inescapable. Did this theme, also central to Something to Answer For, really dominate the English novel of the 1960s and 70’s, or is this a coincidence?) The Colonel fully expects to be murdered one day by the servants he abuses. Bobby has another unsuccessful attempt to pick up a young man for sex; he also seems trapped in a cycle of failure and frustration.

The road journey format of the novel works well, building the suspense as the military presence in the area increases and they approach their destination. Towards the end of the journey Bobby is beaten by some soldiers at an army checkpoint, a beating he accepts stoically as the price of his presence in this part of the world. Finally the compound is reached, and while the rest of the town and countryside is in flames, the area preserved for white settlers seems untouched. Perhaps this suggests that the real price of being in a Free State is paid by the freed rather than by the colonialists?

I didn’t enjoy In a Free State at first. The central characters are unappealing. The descriptions of the countryside are repetitive and a bit flat.

The verges widened; a few tarnished villas were set in large gardens. There was a roundabout, its garden still maintained, and the highway entered the town. Cross-streets, each with a new black-and-white board bearing the name of a minister in the capital, could be seen to end in mud after two or three hundred yards. The town had been built to grow. It hadn’t grown. It remained a collection of old tin-and-timber buildings, its flimsiness pointed by the small new bank building, the motor car and tractor showroom. The mud-splashed police barracks, low white concrete sheds flat to the ground, already looked like the hutments of the African quarter in the capital.

But while this is without doubt a book that is hard to warm to, my instinct is that it will grow on me.