Another early Booker Prize winner. This is interesting and reminds me of some thoughts I had when I found out that a Alice Munro “novel” was also nominated years later. This past year there was a graphic novel nominated as well, and you won’t find me arguing that a graphic novel is not a novel (though I didn’t think that one was particularly good) but you will find people who takes novels “seriously” arguing this point. Like the Munro book, this is an interconnected set of stories. But the connection points here are not that they refer to the same plot or the same characters, but more to a leitmotif that Naipaul explores throughout each. There’s two short stories, a novella, and two seemingly autobiographical sketches/vignettes. All five sections relate to the idea of movement, mobility, and access within otherwise limited, controlled, colonialised spaces.
The two vignettes are about an authorial voice travelling by boat in the Mediterranean and by plane to the US and discuss or ruminate on the concept of free travel brought by money and a relative amount of power. The first story, then, is about a government attache moving to Washington DC and thinking about the greater mobility this affords him, but also reflecting on his interactions with African Americans (largely household staff he interacts with) and their seeming lack of this same mobility. The next story involves two brothers moving through an African country. And then the novel, titled “In a Free State”, is about a gay government official befriending (befrenemying?) a married woman and having an intense, manipulative relationship with her.
Over all the book is interesting, and parts of it stand out. The writing is sound, but I almost feel like Naipaul is exploring some ideas, but they don’t fully come together as well as they do in other novels of his.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Free-State-V-S-Naipaul/dp/1400030552/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=in+a+free+state&qid=1552081487&s=gateway&sr=8-1)