In a Free State

Naipaul's book is a sequence rather than a novel: a prologue and epilogue from his own travel journals framing three pieces of fiction, all of them about people who have left the place that formed them and found no other. In the first, an Indian servant accompanies his employer to Washington and, tasting a freedom he has no equipment to use, drifts into an illegal life among people who despise him. In the second, a Trinidadian follows his brother to London and discovers what he has actually joined. The title novella takes two English expatriates, Bobby and Linda, on a long drive across an unnamed African country from the capital to their compound, as a tribal war breaks out around them and the king is hunted down. They talk, all the way, about servants and sex and their own liberalism, and their contempt for the country they live in surfaces steadily as the danger rises. Naipaul is merciless towards every character, including the version of himself in the journals, and the book's subject is displacement as a permanent condition, with freedom exposed as another word for having no claim on anyone.