Naipaul’s novel is
hilarious in contrasting the routine and the unexpected in human life . Mr Stone
is a sixty- two year old man given to
firm routine, fearful of disturbance but still awaiting some novelty in his
life . He is a creature of habit, punctilious about punctuation , a knight in
his own imagination. The novel starts with his disturbance when a cat jumps on
him, terrifies him and makes him revengeful as it habitually spoils
flowerbed in his garden. He offers cheese as a bait to ensnare him and wreak
his vengeance but the cat is too clever to come back. His housemaid Miss
Millington keeps his house in order and livable.
He is given to ceaseless
reflections. Regarding gardening, it was a means to expend his extra energy .
He relished the activities rather than
results. it mattered little to him that the blooms were discolored by pepper dust. His
delight lay more in preparing the ground for planting than in the planting . which sometimes never
occurred.” (225) his recurring fantasy was flying over things, people, traffic
and turmoil. He came into contact with
Mrs. Springer in a party hosted by Tomlinson, his friend. Both of them were
aged , his story of cat and cheese ‘impressed’
her much to repeat it to others with her
own embellishments and both thought of
each other favorably. Naipaul is known for detailed description of individuals .
Mrs. Springer was over fifty, striking in her
garnets, a dark red dress of watered silk, cut low, the skirt draped , and a
well-preserved gold-embroidered Kashmir shawl. Her manner went contrary to her
dress; it was not a masculinity she attempted, so much a an arch and studied
unfemininity. Her deep voice recalled that of a celebrated actress , as did her
delivery. Whenever she wished to make a telling point she jerked herself
upright form the waist; and at the end of one of her little speeches she
subsided as abruptly, her knees slightly apart, her bony hand falling into the
sink of the skirt thus created. So that, the old fashioned- jewellery and the
dress, which, though of irreproachable cut , appeared to accommodate rather
than fit her body, seemed quite distinct from the personality of the
wearer.(228)
To Mr Stone, his life,
salary friendship , even death of mother
mattered in number of years and
experiences were to be filed and cherished
for future use. His personal appearance, reading of news papers starting
form methodical folding to punctual
reading in prescribed timings as ‘an insulation against the world ‘ (234) , contemplation
of tree in his backyard, Observation of
‘business outfits’ of his assistant Miss Menzies , the ageing and film
watching on every Thursday by Miss Millington, his neighbours all follow a pattern in his mind which
venerates tidiness and ceaseless tranquillity. While reading the part, the
reader cannot help smile that appears slyly on his lips at the description of
Mr Stone’s habits and attitude and the beauty lies in polished and precise
language used by Naipaul. He merely shows what is and it tickles the brain of
the reader and anticipate the futility of such
life style at the end
“The new leaves of spring
, the hard green of summer , the naked black branches of winter, none of these
things spoke of the running out of his life. They were only a reminder of the even flowing of time, of
his mounting experience , his lengthening past.” (234)
His relation with his
sister Olive and her daughter Gwen who dislikes him are what make his routine
life endurable in filial terms. His acquaintance and mutual liking between Mrs.
Springer and himself , their sudden marriage
disturbs the apple cart of his routine life and forces him to be a ‘man’
responsible. He didn’t ask about her
past and suspected that she mocked him for earning just one thousand pounds for
year as a head librarian. The illusions
before marriage disappear slowly and he begins to resent
the loss of his solitude, privacy and
finds the changed behaviour of men and women towards him in the office. The young
girls stopped playful advances to him.
“And as he progressively lost his air of
freedom and acquired the appearance of one paroled from a woman’s
possession the young men, even those who
were married , no longer tolerated him as before ,no longer pretended that he
might be one of them. He attracted in stead the fatiguing attentions of Wilkinson,
the office Buddhist, whose further eccentricity
was to walk about the office corridors in stockinged feet”(253).
Mr. Stone’s aim is to
keep his routine self undisturbed but the external world is not conducive. He
bumps into activity of Guard and one of
the typists in darkness in library and
finds it later disgusting. Even tree which
can find renewal appears to him worth reproaching. The unceasing
renovative activities of his own house
by Mr. Male and the Monster lady ‘s watering her spring flowers made him uneasy. The dinner party which
Margaret arranges without much zeal on his part
his ends dull and mutability of the world a deception and “all that was important was man’s own flesh,
his weakness and corruptibility.” (260)
The apparent calmness of marital life has not removed his anxiety regarding his
wasted years of creativity.
In small incidents ,
Naipaul brings out the fear of man on the verge of retirement and who suffers
from illusion of grandeur but hates loss
tranquillity .
“Every ordered week reminded him of failure ,
of the uncreative years once so comfortingly stacked away in his mind” (264)
Is honey moon to London
and Paris brings out his confusion more clearly. In Cornwall, they blindly
followed a person into fire and smoke of
charred fields rather than away from
them. In the last minute they turned back. To him, “that hallucinatory
movement, when earth and life and senses had been suspended , remained with
him. It was like an experience of nothingness ,an experience of death.”(268)
Naipaul beautifully describes how the tussle between fantasy
and reality annoys man wedded to the routine ,bereft of loving relations and mundane joys of life
and suffers from ambiguous feelings of disturbance . At the
end of the trip , they go to a teashop . After coming out, Margaret tells that
she would present him a watch like the old man who received a watch from his
office after forty years of service.
His annoyance went deeper than she
imagined. It wasn’t only the grotesque scene in the teashop , the sight of the
men, both mountaineer and mouse, reduced to caricature. In the teashop he had
been seized by a revulsion for all the women. For Miss Chichester,
corseted and flat and flourishing, however distressed, however widowed. For the
eater’s keepers , gross in their cosiness. And the blushing little mute in soft
colours he had hated most of all. The decorative little creeper would become
the parasite ; the keeper would become the kept, permitted to have his own sayings, to perform his tricks. (273)
But he knew that he was not thinking fair of Margaret when he felt revulsion
toward marriage.
Later he worked hard on a creative scheme for the retirees ,
sent it to higher ups, received a call for meeting with the top man Sir Harry, got a promotion and was asked to collaborate
with Whymper, a young man who began
‘refining’ the scheme to make it a big publicity exercise for their company causing a misgiving in Richard Stone. Naipaul describes Whymper
through the eyes of Mr Stone who find
his appearance strangely coarse.
The squarish jaws were slack and a little too
fleshy , the lips bruised-looking with rims like welts…the eyes were soft and
brown and unreliable, as of someone made uncertain by suffering. He was of
medium height and average physique. For
such men ready-to-wear suits are made by the hundred thousand , but nothing
whimper wore appeared fit . His clothes
had the slackness of his jaw; they suggested that the flesh below was soft,
never exposed, unhardened. His jacket, always awry, made him look
round-shouldered and sometimes even humped. And his fancy waistcoats-for
whymper was interested in clothes- were only starling and ridiculous.
(281)
The scheme had been discussed, given a shape and launched. A
new department came into existence. Knights companion visited the pensioners
.There were also some problems when one Knight companion claimed more than he spent, another mentioned
as visiting a dead man and still another
used the visits for religious propaganda of the creed f Jehovah’s
Witnesses and a Knight discovered a man
made prisoner of Muswell Hill by his
daughter resulting in publicity for the company . On the home front, Richard Stone became
more important person, his house seen
some renovations , Margaret turned a zealous host to the employees of the
new department and Whymper who remained
cold and unmoved in the beginning
succeeded gradually in gaining
the attention and friendship of
Margaret. Mr Stone began thinking that
Whymper used his skills to steal thunder from his success as the latter became
more popular in the office news
bulletin. He found Whymper ridiculous, lonely, braggart about his relationship
with an actress, given to sexual talk , passing
racist remarks , getting depressed and again regain his former professional self at the office and end of
confidences between them .
Mr Stone’s worry was that
he was not given due recognition for his
creative idea and after the party
at the house of Tomlinson, in which they
were cynosure, he became silent and
annoyed. During the Christmas days, he felt enraged and was filled with anxiety and sense of loss . Then he came to know of the
sudden death of Tomlinson.
Here we find Naipaul depicts the shattering of
illusion of grandeur of an old man. One
can remember the play , Death of
Salesman by Arthur Miller in which the
protagonist Willy Loman who has been
forcibly retired gradually loses his
sense of reality. Here we find Mr Stone finding it difficult to reconcile
his fading ‘brilliance’ usurped by others affecting his
fame and happiness.
Mr Stone found that he
was sliding into a man of no consequence
and part of ‘staff’. Whymper gained more respect, chided Stone when he criticized
a typist of the Polish origin over her
sloppy grammar, got rebuff for his misspelling of ‘intermarry’ as ‘itinery’. He
also observed how Grace rebounded from the grief over the death of her husband his friend Tomlinson and forgot
him, the banding of Margaret and Grace. He turned slow, began playing with the cat
which he hated earlier and developed renewed interest in the spring, tree, and the news. He became more of an observer, foresaw emptiness to come , received
the gentle hints at office that he had done enough. He saw his domestic maid Miss
Millington growing aged, slow and expendable from service and the destruction
of the black cat that proved too terrific to other cats in the locality by the
owner. Naipaul shows the gradual fading out and futility of Mr Stone
, Miss Millington and the cat and an
inevitable expendability of one and all. At the Mr Stone is seen as incoherent by
Margaret when he mentions revival of spring in the lives, protests when he comes to know that Gwen, the daughter of his sister Olive has got
pregnant by Whymper, who has behaved negatively with him. The final blow comes
when he reads news about Whymper’s leaving for another company as publicity
director and credited with success of ‘Knights Companion’ scheme which has been
Mr Stone’s brainchild. After leaving the
office he has had to walk long distance due to transport strike and numbs
his pain.
He stripped the city of all that was enduring and saw that all that
was not flesh was of no importance to man. All that was mattered was man’s own
frailty and corruptibility. The order of the universe, to which he had sought
to ally himself , was not his order. So much he had seen before . but he now
saw , too, that it was not by creation
that man demonstrated his power and defied this hostile order, but by destruction.
By damming the river, by destroying the mountain, by so scarring the face of
the earth that nature’s attempt to reassert herself became a mockery. (343)
He felt like a destroyer
for a while, unlocked and entered the empty home , saw the young black cat and
escaping from the open door , went into his study for doing some work awaiting the return of Margaret.
Naipaul in this novel brilliantly portrays before our eyes the natural law of ageing
and its consequent insignificance and the need to come to terms with the external world without any illusions.
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