Native Grounds

By Paul Gray

LOVE AND DEATH IN A HOT COUNTRY by Shiva Naipaul Viking; 185 pages; $14.95

The setting is the fictitious country Cuyama, "a tract of land perched uneasily on the sloping shoulder of South America, a degree or two north of the Equator." Aubrey St. Pierre, whose once illustrious family grew wealthy with the aid of sugar-cane plantations and slave labor, harbors guilt and runs a bookstore; the Cuyamese citizens, whose culture he hopes to elevate, stay away in droves. Aubrey's wife Dina broods on her mixed Hindustani and Portuguese origins and roundly hates her native grounds: "Nothing worthwhile had ever been created on this sterile patch of earth perched on the edge of a cruel continent; and nothing worthwhile ever would be." Meanwhile, the constitution that was so carefully drawn up when the colony became independent from Britain is now on the verge of being shelved by the strongman President.

Futility does not, as a rule, breed much suspense. And Trinidad-born Author Shiva Naipaul, 39, leaves little room to imagine that life in Cuyama will do anything but grow progressively worse. The interesting question in this novel, Naipaul's third, is not whether Aubrey's idealism will founder but what forms his disillusionment will take. Faced with a failing business and marriage, the hero hurls himself into the struggle to save the constitution.

The so-called People's Plebiscite, which will in fact legalize dictatorship, must be stopped. Aubrey writes letters to editors, signs manifestoes. Dina looks on skeptically: "His passion, his sincerity, could not be disputed. The only thing that could be disputed was his capacity to stem the tide of events." Aubrey's spirits soar when Alexander Richer, an old college friend and now a prominent British journalist, responds to a whim and decides to visit Cuyama for a few days. Aubrey tells Dina: "It's a great coup for us to have him' coming out here." Perhaps ; now the English-speaking :

world, at least, will read about and rally behind the just cause that Aubrey champions.

Nothing of the sort will happen, of course, and Naipaul never suggests otherwise. He concentrates instead on the ways his three main Shiva Naipaul characters find to defend themselves against intractable reality.

The journalist, a self-avowed "moral butterfly" with an airline ticket out, finds himself bored by Cuyama almost as soon as he lands. He has seen poverty and post-colonial delusions of grandeur before, and will again. Dina sinks further into liberating despair, secretly desiring the destruction her husband campaigns against:

"Weren't there times when she, child of a dark race, wanted to pull the whole world down with her, to avenge what it had made of her -- and all like her?"

Aubrey fares worst. His guest reminds him of his own years in England, of a Western standard of civilization wholly lacking in Cuyama: "We go abroad and we see how other people live. We study at their universities, we read their books, we admire their paintings and their fine buildings, we walk in their parks. Then we return home and discover that, in terms of what we've experienced, we're barely human. We discover that we've done nothing worthy of interest, don't know how to do anything and, perhaps, don't even want to do anything."

Readers acquainted with the works of V.S. Naipaul, the author's older brother, may find such condemnations of the Third World familiar. Shiva's views seem harsher, more absolute and, in consequence, less intellectually engaging. But his portrait of a land sinking back into savagery is deft and diverting, a vividly colored paradigm of despair.

-- By Paul Gray