The Gift of a Second Life THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL

By Paul Gray

Although it is called a novel, The Enigma of Arrival stretches the line between fiction and autobiography nearly to the vanishing point. The unnamed narrator is a writer in his mid-50s, an Indian and a Hindu, born in Trinidad, educated at Oxford, who has traveled extensively and lived most of his adult life in England. This person, in other words, is indistinguishable from V.S. Naipaul; and the personality, the tone of voice and cast of mind displayed here resemble the prose of Naipaul's nonfiction (Among the Believers; India: A Wounded Civilization) more closely than that of his other nine novels, including Guerrillas and A Bend in the River. Whether The Enigma of Arrival is literally true or an invention does not particularly matter. But readers who expect a work of pure narrative are in for a surprise.

Naipaul's 19th book yields its pleasures slowly. Its plot is essentially the passage of ten years, during which the writer lives in a cottage on the grounds of a Victorian-Edwardian manor in a Wiltshire valley within easy walking distance of Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain. In the beginning he arrives; at the end he goes. In between, this writer (hereafter called, for the sake of convenience, Naipaul) thinks occasionally about the first 18 years of his life in Trinidad, "my insecure past," and the scholarship that took him to Oxford and England, "the other man's country." He reveals nothing about his university experiences and alludes only glancingly to the following 15 years he spent struggling to make his name as a writer. What engages, indeed mesmerizes, his attention is his sojourn in rural England, "this gift of the second life in Wiltshire, the second, happier childhood as it were, the second arrival (but with an adult's perception) at a knowledge of natural things, together with the fulfillment of the child's dream of the safe house in the wood."

Much of the drama in the book stems from the tensions generated when a ) sensitive grown-up finds himself living in a fantasy of his youth. Naipaul passionately annotates the splendors he observes surrounding the manor cottage: "The beauty of the place, the great love I had grown to feel for it, greater than for any other place I had known." Mixed with this euphoria, though, are some troubling recognitions. The writer cannot forget that he is an "alien" in this paradise, racially distinct, a former colonial subject of the power and wealth that made such a place possible: "Fifty years ago there would have been no room for me on the estate; even now my presence was a little unlikely." Worse, having come upon the landscape of his dreams, Naipaul must also confront the intrusions of reality: "I had seen everything as a kind of perfection, perfectly evolved. But I had hardly begun to look, the land and its life had hardly begun to shape itself about me, when things began to change."

These alterations are recounted in meticulous detail. A neighbor, living in a cottage on farmland that once belonged to the estate, befriends the writer and later falls ill and dies; his carefully maintained garden declines into chaos. A large agricultural concern takes over the surrounding acreage for a while, introducing prefabricated buildings and modern equipment, and then fails; one of the workers hired for this enterprise murders his wife for her infidelity. A London radio personality and book reviewer, distantly related to Naipaul's reclusive landlord, commits suicide. The gardener, whose comings and goings helped the writer regulate his solitary days, is abruptly fired. The man who manages the manor dies suddenly of a stroke. Elms in the valley die out; beech trees near Naipaul's cottage must be cut down; two huge aspens are torn apart by heavy wind.

Naipaul catches two fleeting glimpses of his landlord, but makes no attempt to meet him. The tenant is content with accidental information, the secondhand knowledge that he lives in the immediate vicinity and under the aegis of a bizarre depressive. The owner, rendered "more mysterious" by random images, takes his place in the writer's imaginative life, an intriguing possibility: "We were -- or had started -- at opposite ends of wealth, privilege, and in the hearts of different cultures."

By the standard of much current fiction, these events sound like small potatoes indeed, stuff to get out of the way before the corporate takeover or the bedroom marathon. But Naipaul manages to give each isolated incident the ! inevitability and gravity of history. The impression is not that so little happens in ten years but that a series of small upheavals so shake a tiny, isolated corner of the world. Having found, after some 40 years of struggle, his ideal landscape, Naipaul must watch its deterioration and decline. He can, within reason, be philosophical about this process, acknowledging that his sense of loss is not unique: "Yet I also knew that what had caused me delight, when I first came to the manor, would have caused grief to someone who had been there before me." What he loves represents a dereliction of what existed earlier.

Still, as he realizes that his time in the valley has come to an end, his stoic acceptance of change falters: "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 memories." The conclusion to be drawn from The Enigma of Arrival is both heartbreaking and bracing: the only antidote to destruction -- of dreams, of reality -- is remembering. As eloquently as anyone now writing, Naipaul remembers.