FUKUOKA ¨C It was a textbook print of John Constable¡¯s painting of Salisbury Cathedral that first sparked a young V.S. Naipaul¡¯s fascination with England, if we believe the semi-autobiographical testimony in his novel ¡°The Enigma of Arrival.¡± Naipaul¡¯s narrator is a dispassionate but still sympathetic outsider who, in middle age, lives out his boyhood longings, insinuating himself into the life of a crumbling Wiltshire farm estate over a decade.
Naipaul¡¯s novel is a melancholy meditation on place, belonging and change, chronicling the farm¡¯s decline, the lives of neighbors who move in, depart or grow frail and die, and of the narrator¡¯s maturing observations of English life beyond his youthful infatuation. It is, finally, a monologue on his reconciliation with his past and his restless transnational identity.
¡°The Enigma of Arrival¡± also testifies to the ¡°great movement of peoples¡± and ¡°cultural mixing¡± that transformed the United Kingdom after 1950 ¡ª and Naipaul had been in the vanguard of this movement as a Trinidadian scholarship student at Oxford.
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