The Mimic Men

Ralph Singh’s Memoir

Ralph Singh writes his memoirs in a London hotel room. He is in middle age, a former politician of Isabella — a fictional Caribbean island small enough to stand for any of a dozen real ones — and his political career is over, his marriage is over, and he has retreated to London, which was always the metropolis he aspired to and never quite arrived in. The memoir is his attempt to understand how he got here: to this room, to this failure, to this version of himself.

The structure of the novel is non-linear in the way that memory is non-linear — moving between Ralph’s island childhood, his time as a student in London, his return to Isabella to pursue politics, the political career that ends badly, and the marriage to Sandra, an English woman, that ends worse. The non-linearity is not an aesthetic game; it is the formal expression of Ralph’s situation. He cannot tell his story straight because he does not understand it as a sequence of causes and effects. He understands it as a series of failures of fit — between who he was educated to be and where he was born, between what he wanted and what was available, between the roles the decolonizing island required of him and the ones he had absorbed from colonial education.

Isabella’s independence movement and its aftermath are rendered with the sharp, uncomfortable clarity of someone who has been inside political failure. The parties, the rhetoric, the street politics, the newspaper wars — and then the moment when independence arrives and nobody quite knows what to do with it. The organizing purpose that opposition provided disappears when you win. What colonial politicians learned was how to oppose the colonial power. What they did not learn was how to govern.

Mimicry and Its Costs

The word “mimicry” in Naipaul’s title anticipates — and significantly influenced — what would become one of the central concepts of postcolonial theory. Homi Bhabha’s theorization of colonial mimicry, developed in essays through the 1980s and collected in The Location of Culture (1994), drew substantially on the vision of the colonial subject that Naipaul had already dramatized in Ralph Singh: a person who has been educated toward the culture of the colonizer, who has internalized its values and its aesthetics and its sense of what serious human life looks like, and who therefore cannot inhabit his own actual life without feeling that he is performing it badly.

The cost of mimicry is not merely psychological embarrassment, though it is that. It is the systematic inability to act originally — to do anything that was not first done elsewhere, by someone else, in a context that was not yours. Ralph Singh’s politics are mimicry: independence movements modeled on independence movements, speeches that echo other speeches, a sense of historical destiny borrowed from people whose history was different. When the borrowed script runs out, there is nothing behind it.

This analysis sits uncomfortably with readers who feel that Naipaul’s vision of the colonial subject is itself a form of the colonizer’s contempt — that to say the Caribbean can only imitate is to repeat the colonial judgment. The discomfort is not easily resolved. Naipaul was writing from inside the experience he described, and Ralph Singh’s self-awareness does not make him unreliable. But The Mimic Men is a novel that asks to be argued with, and arguing with it is part of reading it seriously.

Reading Naipaul’s Political Fiction

The Mimic Men was published in 1967, three years after Naipaul completed An Area of Darkness, his devastating account of his first visit to India, and twelve years before A Bend in the River, his most sustained engagement with African decolonization. It sits at the center of his political writing — more analytically explicit than A House for Mr. Biswas, less panoramic than A Bend in the River, and more directly engaged with Caribbean decolonization than either.

The comparison to In a Free State (1971), which won the Booker Prize, is instructive. In a Free State is fragmentary and refuses to center on a single consciousness; The Mimic Men is relentlessly focused on Ralph Singh’s mind. Both are concerned with the aftermath of colonialism and the disorder it leaves behind, but they address that disorder in opposite formal ways.

Naipaul received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. The Nobel committee cited his having “united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” The prize was controversial, as Naipaul himself had been throughout his career — his views on Islam, on Africa, on women, and on the Caribbean generated sustained opposition. Reading The Mimic Men in this context means holding the analysis and the controversy simultaneously, which is uncomfortable and also probably the right way to read it.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Naipaul’s most intellectually demanding political novel, and the fullest expression of his central preoccupation: what colonialism costs the people it educated as well as the people it exploited.