Half a Life by V S Naipaul

The cover of this book presents two startling images. One is of a cobra emerging from a greenish bottle. The other is of the author, chuckling and cradling a relaxed cat. The new, cuddly Naipaul this seems to promise is not much in evidence within. This is the first conventional novel for 15 years from a writer famous for asserting that the novel is dead.

Now, urged by his publishers, he has written a largely straightforward fiction about a single protagonist, though at the same time claiming that his travel writing will come to be seen as his more important work. Naipaul writes a prose as clean as a stripped wand, but however plain the language, the ideas it delivers are not. The book strikes echoes from his Booker Prize winner of 30 years ago, In a Free State, but it is a new and troubling story.

The novel recounts the first half of Willie Somerset Chandran's life. He would be nearly 70, Naipaul's age, now. Willie is an Indian who comes to Britain to study in the Fifties, as Naipaul did (though from Trinidad, not India), and moves on to Africa, as did his creator. Willie, however, goes not to Uganda but to an unnamed Mozambique. The book opens with Willie's father filling in his background, a story of displacement within India, in step with that which led to the migration of Naipaul's ancestors.

His naming after Somerset Maugham infuriates Willie. There is a hard look at the caste system, seen as a form of racism. Some years ago I asked Naipaul, who had written three non-fiction books about India, if he might set a fiction there. His answer was an abrupt "How could I?". His new book breaches that barrier, though in a curiously stilted way.

At the core is a series of snake moments. Naipaul is still peerless as a deviser of the shocking icon. He builds a scene of metaphysical loss as compelling as any Renaissance canvas of the expulsion from paradise. Here the flaming sword is replaced by a spitting cobra which can blind from a distance. This adds an Oedipal dimension to the book's waltz with Freudian sexuality, but it serves also as an image of justice, or Hindu dharma. Naipaul has always made it his mission to demystify, to penetrate the mythologies insulating populations from the moral truth. For he is, in the last analysis, and despite his carefully staged ambivalences, a moralist.

The book's premise seems to be that the European empires of the last 500 years simply built on the exploitations endemic to the societies they were taking over. The title resonates with the half-life of radioactive substances, which, like the failures of compassion in human history, have phenomenal durability. Naipaul seems to be inviting rage, and acknowledgement of the guilt of complicity.

For an ostensibly sexy book, Half a Life is a turn-off. If anyone else had written such an unarousing chronicle of the sexual exploits of a hard-to-love character the manuscript, which reads like three stories cobbled together, would probably not have been published. But while sexual fulfilment is partly its topic, it is not really about the erotic, but social relations fatally tangled with desire. The great unnoticed irony at the core is that when the aptly named Willie reaches sexual bliss with his Portuguese beloved (also aptly named Graça) his transformation takes the form of discovering himself rather than her.

But Willie's tale is also about the half-and-half status accorded to people like himself in the neo-colonial world. As an aspiring writer in London, he inhabits the immigrant's twilight zone. In colonial Africa he crosses, as he says, to the other side of imperial power, but is still marginalised because of his race. The book ends with his refusal to accept the half-life he has lived, dependent on his wife. He takes responsibility for his own life, though what this might mean is left unsaid. One of the other snake moments is about breaking out into freedom, conveyed through horror.

At the assassination of Samora Machel, when South Africa's apartheid regime brought down the plane of the president of Mozambique, another Caribbean writer, the late Guyanese poet Martin Carter, wrote of "the world/ Falling/ Out of grace/ Again." The world Naipaul portrays, like the one we inhabit, seems to be always already falling out of grace.