Reading V. S. Naipaul's new novel A Bend In The River, one is easily reminded of Heart Of Darkness. Resemblances quickly declare themselves…. Conrad's novel is of a time of European ascendancy. Naipaul's book succeeds Conrad's and like it may come to be seen in time as one of the very best things written about Africa. The difference is that A Bend In The River is the story of European, Arab and Asian eclipse…. [Nothing] is pre-ordained in A Bend In The River. True, men are at the mercy of events, the smart men of the town, the soldiers and politicians as much as the poor Africans who scrape a living, or as often do not, from forest and river…. The novel assesses three things: firstly the insecurity Salim feels about his identity as an 'African' Asian and his curious relationship with 'true' Africa, coming as he does from what he describes as 'an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place', and his growing realization that unlike the Arabs and Europeans who still have their power base, their money and technology, Asians 'had ceased to count in Africa'; secondly there is Salim's ironic understanding of the vanity of foreign settlements; thirdly there is the predicament of the Africans under their dictator, the 'Big Man', like a distant Caesar in his capital (the Roman references are numerous), his image everywhere, ruling by guile, division, diversion, his motto Discipline Avant Tout—'what a complicated lie those words had become'—which is traced to the same root. All have absorbed 'the lies of the white man'…. Never has Naipaul's eye for the failures of post-colonial ambitions been sharper or more compassionate. (pp. 124-26)
The most extraordinary thing about this novel is the way in which Naipaul gets beneath the idiocy and brutality to a level of understanding in which sympathy with the attempt to struggle forward mixes with horror at the results. He has painted an extraordinarily vivid picture of modern Africa.
