Dead on Arrival

Siddhartha Deb on Naipaul's Magic Seeds:
"This theme, of rebellions that always turn sour, will be familiar to readers of Naipaul's previous novels. It comes with the territory, and is sometimes made worthwhile by other elements of his writing: the interest in characters disfigured by social change; an instinct for the jagged detail that captures character or place; the use of simple, specific words (and a corresponding hostility towards abstraction); the deft expositions. These are the qualities that have made Naipaul one of the finest social novelists of our time; yet none of these is enough to rescue Magic Seeds.
Naipaul's gift for social observation has always had to struggle against the current of his political sensibility, his unwillingness to register the full implications of what his novelist's eye has sought out. In this book, where the idea being confronted is the rationale behind mass political movements, his characteristic feeling for form, language and character is swamped by a tide of distaste for Maoists, Indian peasants, British workers, white liberals and women. The failures of radical armed movements and the welfare state may be worth examining, but Naipaul's idea of critique consists of placing pebbles in a dead man's mouth."