Review of the Novel “The Mimic Men”.

The Mimic Men is the Novel written by V.S. Naipaul who was a renowned author of several popular
books and WINNER of the eminent awards in the field of literature including the Novel prize as well.
This book is also one of his great works which has gained much popularity and critics appraisal. It is said
to be a profound novel of cultural displacement which so aptly describes a colonial man's experience in a
post-colonial world.

Now starting with this Novel, It is not a large novel, and divided in three parts as well. As a whole It is in the
form of autobiographical novel of a fictional character named Ralph Singh or Ranjit Kripal Singh. It is his
memoir which he has written while he finally moved to London and started living in a private hotel. It is
throughout as a journey and experiences of the life of 40 years old Ralph Singh.

The plot of the novel is simple and centered upon Ralph Singh who is basically an Indo Caribbean politician
from Isabella who narrates in the first person. Singh is currently in exile in London where he is attempting to
write his political memoirs. He was born and raised in Isabella, to which he returns after a brief stay in
England, to start a career as a business and later as a politician.

As we go through this Novel, we get that Ralph Singh is a very chaotic character. He is not like a typical Hero
type like courageous, valiant, good, follower of Aristotalian ethics, not at all. He is unsuccessful in both
personal and professional life. His married life was kind of not fair enough. His political career which was
initially successful but later also happened to be a failure. He affiliates himself with the English ways of life.
In early life, he changed his name from Ranjit Kripal Singh to Ralph Singh while he was still at school.

A large amount of this novel is devoted to Singh's childhood and the effect that the overpowering need to
improve one’s own status had on him, his friends and family. His political career takes up only a filth of the
whole book and so in this regard this book is more of a psychological study than a political study knowing the
fact that Singh is a direct result of the effects of British colonialism. Here is also the fact that he thinks
himself as shipwrecked on Isabella.

In Mimic Men, Naipaul is primarily interested in the development of Singh's personality as he wrestles with
the difficulty of finding reality which however conditioned him for being settle for mimicry. We see that
the character has significantly growing suspicion of the concrete world and the growing need which each
individual has to isolate and define himself if he wishes to have any permanence in this changing, artificial
and synthetic world.

The craving by the islanders to escape the horrors of their modern world is shared by the character Ralph
Singh. Here Naipaul renders his personal touch to reconcile the temper of the Carribean islanders. Naipaul's
distrust of the concrete world in the Carribean goes further than this. He presented through the character of
Singh that they might be allured by the fantastic landscapes and vegetation but ultimately it is realised that the
colourful tropical world around him is not a natural one and that it has not been created by west Indians but
has been conceived by foreign visitors for their own amusement as described in this passage:-

"He told me about the Coconut, which fringed our beaches, about the sugarcane, the bamboo and mango. He
told me about our flowers, whose colours we saw afresh in the postcards which were beginning to appear in
our shop. The war was bringing up visitors, who saw more clearly than we did, we learned to see with them,
and we were seeing only like visitors. In the heart of the city he showed me a clump of old fruit trees: the
sight of a slave provision ground. From this point look above the roofs of the city, and imagine! Our
landscapes is as manufactured as that of any great French or English park. But we walked in a garden of hell,
among trees, some still without popular
names whose seeds had sometimes been brought our island in the intestines of slaves."

Here this young Ralph Singh is shocked to find out that he is looking at his birthplace with the eyes of a
foreigner.

Coming to his personal life, His relationship with Women are primarily sexual as he seeks comfort in the
arms of prostitutes and we need to question seriously about his motives for marrying his wife Sandra. In the
Mimic men, Naipaul describes a number of Sexual encounters explicitly in order to reassert that Sex
introduces more barriers between people than it brings down. Also we get an idea of why relationship fails as
It needs a mutual understanding of a regard for their individual dignity. If we attempt transform somebody in
accordance to our own selfishness, relationships break. The artificial masks that so many people wear make it
practically impossible for any real human relationship to develop. Same happened with Singh and Sandra.
The reason for the failure of their marriage are obvious.

Another thing here is that there is other as dangerous to relationship in the mimic world is the tendency of
people to submit themselves to the roles invented for them by others. After Sandra goes out of his life Singh
replaces her with his friend Browne who plans a political future for him.

"He presented me with a picture of myself which it reassured me to study.. . ..she presented with my role."

Singh's relationship with Browne is bound to fail because neither of them is real at this point. Many masks
still Stands between them. All of Singh's other relationships from his schoolboy ones to political ones, are
hindered by the mimic nature of the world he lives in.

When Ralph Singh turns politician or when his political life starts, He quickly learns the hollowness of his
island's independence. Their lives are dependent on foreign investors’ money and they are not more than
slaves to them. Actually, their position is more dangerous than their original slavery since they remain
unconscious of it as it is mentioned:

"Whatever was said, the end was always the same, applause, the path made through the crowd, the hands
tapping, rubbing- caressing my shoulder, the willing hands it slaves now serving a cause they thought to be
their own."

Ralph Singh understands that "So long as our dependence remained unquestioned our politics were a joke."

We get the motive here as how a person get enthusiastic about doing things that play a role to change the
society from the agony of the suppressors.
Ralph Singh is basically frustrated of this unreal world.

He wants a change or order while the whole life of him is moving from little bastard world to another. In
each world he try to escape from and to impose order in his life. In writing his memoirs he mentioned several
aspects of his life where he relentlessly searching for order in his chaotic life.

After all this, he doesn't get what he wanted. He had to move in exile where he isolated himself. He finds that
only it can provide him freedom or mental peace from the distorted chaotic world but though there is hopeful
and encouraging about this isolation that everything is not ended for him as he says: "I have cleared the desks,
as it were, and prepared myself for fresh action. It will be the action of a free man".
Overall Naipaul through his cohesive writings has presented to us through the Character of Ralph Singh that
how modern man can be transcend and be extended by his own duplicate world. The Mimic man is thus a
very engaging and well written masterpiece which reconcile the importance of a individual freedom with the
daily encounters of this tragic world.

The End
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