 First edition | |
| Author | V. S. Naipaul |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Postcolonial fiction |
| Publisher | Andre Deutsch |
Publication date | 1967 |
The Mimic Men is a novel by V. S. Naipaul, first published by Andre Deutsch in the UK in 1967.
| First edition | |
| Author | V. S. Naipaul |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Postcolonial fiction |
| Publisher | Andre Deutsch |
Publication date | 1967 |
The Mimic Men is a novel by V. S. Naipaul, first published by Andre Deutsch in the UK in 1967.
Not long after finishing A Flag on the Island , Naipaul began work on the novel The Mimic Men, though for almost a year he did not make significant progress. [1] At the end of this period, he was offered a Writer-in-Residence fellowship at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. [2] There, in early 1966, Naipaul began to rewrite his material, and went on to complete the novel quickly. [3] The finished novel broke new ground for him. [3] Unlike his earlier fiction, it is not comic. [4] It does not unfold chronologically. [5] Its language is allusive and ironic, and its overall structure is whimsical. [6] It has strands of both fiction and non-fiction, a precursor of Naipaul's approach in later novels. [7] It is intermittently dense, even obscure, [5] but it also has beautiful passages, especially in the descriptions of the fictional tropical island of Isabella. The subject of sex appears explicitly for the first time in Naipaul's work. [8]
The plot, to the extent that there is one, is centred on Ralph Singh, an Indo-Caribbean politician from Isabella who narrates in the first person. [6] Singh is in exile in London and attempting to write his political memoirs. [6] Earlier, in the immediate aftermath of decolonisation in a number of British colonies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Singh shared political power with a more powerful Afro-Caribbean politician. Soon the memoirs take on a more personal aspect. There are flashbacks to the formative and defining periods of Singh's life. In many of these, during crucial moments, whether during his childhood, his married life, or his political career, he appears to abandon engagement and enterprise. [6] He rationalises later that these belong only to fully made societies.
When The Mimic Men was published, it received generally positive critical notice. In particular, Caribbean politicians such as Michael Manley and Eric Williams weighed in, the latter writing, "V. S. Naipaul's description of West Indians as 'mimic men' is harsh but true ..." [9]
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