Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin and lived in Oxford most of her life. In our opinion her best five novels are Under the Net (1954), The Red and the Green (1965), The Nice and the Good, Henry and Cato (1976) and The Black Prince (1973). The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978.
Age in year of publication: forty-nine.
Vladimir Nabokov 1899–1977
1955 Lolita
Nymphet: a young girl just past puberty; beautiful, semi-divine. Humbert Humbert, born in Paris, comes to the New England countryside in 1947 and encounters Lolita, twelve years old, ‘with an impact of passionate recognition’. To take possession of his beloved, he marries her mother. Sex with his dream-child, urgently longed for by Humbert, knowingly accepted by Lolita, becomes more than child abuse — as Lolita pertly points out, it’s incest.
Humbert sweeps up his Lolita and for two years lives in heaven and hell, travelling with her through America. Humbert’s festering soul chronicles every moment of lust and play, always creating more trouble, inventing dangers. Lolita grows up, the outside world encroaches. There is separation and death — both the same for Humbert.
In Lolita Nabokov’s imagination is that of a magician puppeteer. Humbert Humbert is a monster, yet we do not always feel so; Lolita the abused girl-child alternately startles and beguiles us. Their story is not sordid but full of yearning, wordplay and jokes — ironic and biting, often erotic. Lolita is one of the immortal love stories. For its fabulous language, its wit, its revolutionary portrait of a different kind of moral monster (not a political one), and because it brilliantly cocks a snook at all known taboos, Lolita is one of the most influential novels of our time.
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St Petersburg, and lived in Europe, the USA and then Switzerland. He was a master prose stylist in both Russian and English. Lolita was rejected by many publishers on the grounds of obscenity. Like Joyce’s Ulysses it was published first in France, in English, and did not appear in the United States until 1958. The first British edition was published a year later.
Age in year of publication: fifty-six.
(1) V. S. Naipaul 1932–
1961 A House for Mr Biswas
The expectations of Mohun Biswas are not great. Assured at birth of a miserable life by the village pundit, the curse of his life proves to be the community into which he is born: the Hindus of Trinidad. Overpowering in their vociferous insistence on conformity and control, this swarm of venal, fighting tragicomedians is vividly and preposterously alive. Most ebullient is Mr Biswas, a template of indignation and ambition, albeit modest: all he wants is a house of his own, some dignity, some privacy, where the irritations of his in-laws can be viewed from afar.
Out of this simple wish Naipaul created this masterpiece, and in Mr Biswas, with his stomach powders and fluent Trinidadian English, one of those characters who becomes a part of life. We follow him through a plethora of jobs, from sign painter and sugar-cane overseer — Mr Biswas miserable — to hilariously inventive journalist — Mr Biswas happy. We are with him as son, husband, father and testy family man until his final triumph: a peculiar house of his own.
A House for Mr Biswas is also a history of, and a farewell to, Naipaul’s own people, written as the old ways were disappearing. Its greatness lies in its laughing testimony to the frustrations and humiliations of the poor, expressed with magnificent humour and invention, without the bleak despair which marks much of his later work.
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, but came to England in 1950 and now lives in Wiltshire. His travel books include An Area of Darkness (1964), about India and The Return of Eva Péron (1980). His other novels include The Enigma of Arrival (1987), Half A Life (2001) and Magic Seeds (2004). His many awards include the Booker Prize for In a Free State, the David Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement and in 2001 the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Age in year of publication: twenty-nine.
(2) V. S. Naipaul 1932–
1979 A Bend in the River
V. S. Naipaul’s most brilliant novels are In a Free State (1971), A Bend in the River and The Enigma of Arrival (1987), with their sombre tone and grave, melancholy wisdom. Of the three, A Bend in the River is the best.
The novel takes place in a country very like Zaire, where the narrator, Salim, a Muslim whose family is of Indian trader origin, moves during a time of conflict and sets up shop. The novel deals with history not as a rich legacy full of ancestral voices, but as a set of erasures, and this makes the tone very dark indeed. Against this vision of the past as a void is the deep richness of the present; the minor characters who impinge on Salim’s life, such as the servant Metty, the sorceress Zabeth and her son Ferdinand, are wonderfully and vividly drawn, as are the dramatic changes which take place in our narrator’s life in the village, and the slow eruption — this is after all Conrad’s territory — of civil strife. There is a scene where the President — clearly a version of Mobutu — speaks on the radio, which is utterly electrifying, as are the later scenes of catastrophe in the book.
Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
R. K. Narayan 1906–2001
1952 The Financial Expert
Narayan’s great novels are set in his fictional town of Malgudi, in southern India. There is something particularly engaging about the stumblings of Margayya, the hero of this one, who luxuriates in an anxious love of money. He begins his financial endeavours sitting under a banyan tree with a tin box, extorting rupees out of any simple soul who comes his way. Fate, in the shape of a sex manual at first called Philosophy and Practice of Kissing and later more timidly entitled Domestic Harmony, makes him an entrepreneur. An enslaved wife, a house symbolically partitioned from his brother with whom he is forever scratchily at war, and a son, Balu, so loved and so unworthy that he proves to be Margayya’s worst investment, complete Margayya’s world.
Narayan has been attacked for presenting the miseries of India — poverty, the caste system, etc. — too benevolently. This politically correct position fails to see that Narayan’s lightness of touch and unruffled irony reveal a thousand trenchant truths. The bombastic Margayya, with his vanity, his large ambitions and small meannesses and his manoeuvrings around the gods and Mammon, lives the harsh life of those at the bottom of the heap. This is all the more apparent for the vigour, laughter and buoyancy Margayya uses to combat the weaknesses of his pinched soul. That is the real genius of Narayan.