In a Free State

In 1971, the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul won the Booker Prize for Fiction for the novel In a Free State, which is more like a collection of short fiction pieces that focus on the experiences of uprooted people trying to make their way in different kinds of “free” societies. Drawing on his Indian heritage and his childhood in Trinidad, the British author considers what freedom means in different contexts: the democratizing and class-blurring freedom of a first-world country, the chaotic freedom of an incipient revolution, and the anarchic freedom of having power over other people. The stories of In a Free State explore the ways these freedoms sometimes empower, but more often endanger and destabilize, those who encounter them for the first time or who are on the wrong side of the power dynamic.

The novel opens with a prologue that is purportedly an excerpt from a travel journal, which forms the first part of the novel’s framing narrative. While on a ferry from Greece to Egypt, the narrator notes that some of the passengers are displaced people, like exiled Egyptian Greeks, while others are only identified by their nationality. Although the narrator is pained to observe a Lebanese couple and a man from Austria bully and demean an old, seemingly intellectually disabled, homeless tramp who brags about being a man of the world, the narrator doesn’t intervene.

As the title of the first short story, “One out of Many” is an ironic reference to e pluribus unum, the motto of the US. Santosh leads a satisfying life as a cook and servant to a civil service officer in Bombay. When his Sahib (boss) is transferred to Washington, DC, Santosh leaves his family to accompany him. Santosh has a very hard time coping with his sudden poverty: the exchange rate makes rupees almost worthless, and Santosh lives a prisoner-like existence in a small cupboard in Sahib’s office. By chance Santosh meets Priya, who offers him much more money and his own apartment to come work in his restaurant, an offer Santosh immediately takes. Santosh has a one night stand with a black woman, but his racism makes him feel shame about the encounter. The restaurant job turns out to also be a kind of trap, especially when Santosh realizes that he in the country illegally and could be deported. Priya’s advice is that Santosh should marry the black woman in order to become a US citizen, and eventually Santosh does just that. He is now free in America, something that his countrymen would consider a success, but his circumstances do not make him happy.



The second story, “Tell Me Who to Kill,” features a West Indian narrator looking back over his life as he travels to his brother’s wedding accompanied by a white man named Frank. Flashing back to his impoverished life in his native country twenty years earlier, he remembers deciding that his younger brother Dayo should live a better life. The narrator also remembers the condescending way that his uncle Stephen would brag about his own family’s successes. When Stephen sends his son to Montreal for a better education, the narrator arranges for Dayo to live with Stephen’s family. But after Dayo complains of ill treatment, the narrator manages to get himself and Dayo to London – the narrator works in a factory and looks after Dayo, who is supposed to study Aeronautical Engineering. Even though the narrator eventually saves enough money to open a successful restaurant, he is quickly dismayed by the results: despite all his effort and sacrifice, Dayo is blowing off his school work entirely. The narrator snaps, killing one of the jerky kids that hangs out in his restaurant. As we come back to the present, we realize that Frank is a prison guard – the narrator has been released for a short time to go to his brother’s wedding.

These short stories are followed by a novella that shares its title with the book itself. Set in an unnamed newly independent African country that is a thinly disguised version of Uganda, the story takes place as the king is about to be deposed by a president on the verge of assuming dictatorial power. As violence increases, two young white British people take a road trip through the country to the safety of the gated expatriate compound. Bobby, a government official is a gay man who says that Africa has made him a sense of beauty and belonging, freeing him from the mental anguish that caused his breakdown at Oxford University. He feels mostly contempt for Linda, the wife of another official, because she thinks that the British should never have come to this country in the first place and could never belong there. Their trip is marked by an increasing sense of danger and they observe instances of disturbing violence as the president’s fellow tribesmen destroy the villages of the king’s supporters. Along the way, Linda tries to have an affair with an American man, to Bobby’s great hostility – potentially because Bobby’s own attempt to pick up a young Zulu man failed. The pair stop at the hotel run by a British colonel who explodes and accuses his servant Peter of plotting his murder, and then they come across the spot where the deposed king is said to have been killed. Just before they get to their destination, Bobby is viciously beaten by soldiers at a checkpoint, despite his protestations that he is a government official. In the compound, Bobby’s native servant shows no pity for his boss’s injuries, and Bobby considers firing him.

The novel closes with another travel vignette, where the prologue’s narrator describes another trip to Egypt. In a Cairo hotel, one employee’s job is to use a whip to chase away beggar children so that they don’t bother the tourists. For entertainment, an Italian hotel guest starts repeatedly throwing food toward the children in order to watch them run to grab it and then get whipped for coming too close to the hotel. Although none of the other tourists react, the narrator is reminded of the ferry-boat tramp, and grabs the whip away from the Egyptian hotel employee. The employee grovels for forgiveness, begging the narrator not to complain about him to the management. Feeling powerless, the narrator keeps an eye on the Italian for the rest of his trip.