The Enigma of Arrival

The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections is a 1986 semi-autobiographical novel by Nobel-prize winning author V.S. Naipaul. Although not strictly autobiographical, the novel contains many autobiographical elements, and the narrator is widely accepted to be, in essence, Naipaul. The story follows a young Trinidadian who travels to Wiltshire, England, where he settles and lives as a writer. The novel captures his observations of his adopted home, the people who surround him there, and how his reflections on them change over time. The Enigma of Arrival takes its name from a painting by Giorgio de Chirico. According to novelist Ian MacKenzie, “That painting provides the inspiration for a not-quite novel-within-the-novel – one the nameless first-person narrator dwells on but never writes – about a visitor who arrives at an ancient port city and begins a journey of self-discovery that moves toward an unforeseen ending. The same is basically true of Naipaul’s own biography, and of the path taken by the not-quite Naipaul in this extraordinary piece of literature.”

The narrator of The Enigma of Arrival rents a small cottage in Wiltshire England. Fields surround it, and a river runs through the property. In the first section of the book, “Jack's Garden,” Naipaul describes life in the English countryside in great detail. He also spends time meditating on Jack, the owner of a neighboring property. He comes to realize that Jack is not as simple as he seems; while at first, the narrator sees him as something of an English archetype, an expression of the landscape, and a bit of a literary trope, he comes to see that, in reality, Jack is more complex. He, for instance, gave up a more traditional life so that he could live more rustically in the countryside. The narrator also realizes that Jack has wrought his beautiful surroundings by gardening to make his property as lush as it is – it is his legacy. By reflecting on Jack, the narrator comes to see how much a home reflects its owner. Finally, Jack, who has become old, dies, and new owners purchase the land, transforming it into a small modern farm. One of the workers on the new farm murders his wife. The narrator watches it all from afar and meditates on change.

“Journey,” about the narrator's beginnings in England, includes several flashbacks and reminiscences. The narrator was an adolescent when he received a scholarship to study at Oxford; he describes boarding school life, his feelings on the English, and how different it all was from what he knew growing up in the British colony of Trinidad. He considers the impact that British colonialism has had on him, not only directly as a Trinidadian, but also upon his development as a writer, teasing out some of the difficulties of being a colonial subject in the motherland.

In “Ivy,” the narrator notices his landlord drive by one day in a flashy car. He compares this man with his privileged life to another man whom the narrator has seen about town, who seems to the landlord's polar opposite. The narrator returns to the topic of Jack and his garden and comparing the garden visually with the works of well-known artists – including Giorgio de Chirico, whose own The Enigma of Arrival became the title of Naipaul's novel. The narrator considers Pitton, as well, the gardener, seeing him as a man who has settled for less than he might otherwise have achieved. This occasions a long reflection on the nature of failure, and how the narrator himself has dealt with failure in his writings. He also returns to the topic of home, and how important a home is to one's happiness.

The final two sections of the novel are “Rooks” and “The Ceremony of Farewell.” The narrator recalls the de Chirico painting that inspired the book, theorizing about the effect of place on imagination and the creative process. All journeys condition the terms of their arrivals, and the narrator reflects on how his life in Wiltshire was conditioned by his upbringing in Trinidad. But Wiltshire also represents the effect of chance upon his life – it has taught him to accept and honor the power of chance and unexpected change. The Enigma of Arrival ends with a change of the most unexpected and difficult kind: the death of the narrator's sister back in Trinidad. This is followed by a thoughtful description of the death ceremony that follows.

A quiet, meditative, wandering book, The Enigma of Arrival defies traditional genre conventions by largely abandoning traditional plot arcs in favor of eagerly winding down philosophical tangents. Given that Naipaul has written about “the death of the novel” format, the book is an interesting commentary on what constitutes a novel; it seems to attempt to replace the action of the traditional novel with elegant ruminations on the secret meanings of everyday people and objects.