Books: The Gift of a Second Life THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL

Although it is called a novel, The Enigma of Arrival stretches the line between fiction and autobiography nearly to the vanishing point. The unnamed narrator is a writer in his mid-50s, an Indian and a Hindu, born in Trinidad, educated at Oxford, who has traveled extensively and lived most of his adult life in England. This person, in other words, is indistinguishable from V.S. Naipaul; and the personality, the tone of voice and cast of mind displayed here resemble the prose of Naipaul's nonfiction (Among the Believers; India: A Wounded Civilization) more closely than that of his other nine novels, including Guerrillas and A Bend in the River. Whether The Enigma of Arrival is literally true or an invention does not particularly matter. But readers who expect a work of pure narrative are in for a surprise.

Naipaul's 19th book yields its pleasures slowly. Its plot is essentially the passage of ten years, during which the writer lives in a cottage on the grounds of a Victorian-Edwardian manor in a Wiltshire valley within easy walking distance of Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain. In the beginning he arrives; at the end he goes. In between, this writer (hereafter called, for the sake of convenience, Naipaul) thinks occasionally about the first 18 years of his life in Trinidad, "my insecure past," and the scholarship that took him to Oxford and England, "the other man's country." He reveals nothing about his university experiences and alludes only glancingly to the following 15 years he spent struggling to make his name as a writer. What engages, indeed mesmerizes, his attention is his sojourn in rural England, "this gift of the second life in Wiltshire, the second, happier childhood as it were, the second arrival (but with an adult's perception) at a knowledge of natural things, together with the fulfillment of the child's dream of the safe house in the wood."

Much of the drama in the book stems from the tensions generated when a ) sensitive grown-up finds himself living in a fantasy of his youth. Naipaul passionately annotates the splendors he observes surrounding the manor cottage: "The beauty of the place, the great love I had grown to feel for it, greater than for any other place I had known." Mixed with this euphoria, though, are some troubling recognitions. The writer cannot forget that he is an "alien" in this paradise, racially distinct, a former colonial subject of the power and wealth that made such a place possible: "Fifty years ago there would have been no room for me on the estate; even now my presence was a little unlikely." Worse, having come upon the landscape of his dreams, Naipaul must also confront the intrusions of reality: "I had seen everything as a kind of perfection, perfectly evolved. But I had hardly begun to look, the land and its life had hardly begun to shape itself about me, when things began to change."