[In the following review, King provides a favorable assessment of Half a Life.]

Is Willie right? He has traveled from India to England, Africa, and Germany. By the standards of most people, he has had a remarkably full life by the age of forty-one, but is a life of action good? Throughout the novel the value of political action and of political gestures are called into doubt. Ideas of revolutionary justice, liberation, and egalitarianism seem inevitably to lead to “the Pol Pot position” of massive killing to cleanse society and culture of aliens, hybridity, and their influence. Nevertheless, everyone is hybrid.

Although the novel has an epic sweep of allusion, ranging in time from India before the Islamic conquest to the present, with Indians in contemporary Berlin supporting the Tamil struggle in Sri Lanka, its main events cover about a century, starting with a great-grandfather in the 1890s. Half a Life is a version of the multigenerational family story within a colonial setting and tells of a foolish father, his bad marriage, and his relationship to his son, who will eventually go to England for further education, become a writer, and tell the reader the story that comprises the novel. Half a Life might be regarded as a version of that autobiographical novel which continues to exist at a deep level of the imagination behind much of Naipaul's fiction.

Major themes are conquest, colonialism, its establishment by force, its history, its nature, the social and racial orders it produces, and the problems of what replaces it. The novel suggests that life has always been a series of diasporas of translations from one place to another, and what seems settled is actually undergoing a process of change. Behind the concern with imperialism is the more significant theme that life consists of people desiring more and trying to satisfy and advance themselves by conquering or tricking others. Although we create stories to give order to and to make sense of our lives, history repeats itself as a cycle of themes and variations.

Characteristic of Half a Life is the reliance on dialogue and the telling of the histories of characters through compressed anecdotes. The fiction is influenced by Naipaul's nonfictional reportage, in which the author has largely disappeared to be replaced by voices; or, the author has become one of the characters, explaining his perspective on events in relationship to his own experiences. Because the main character lacks in passion, the tone is flat, but the story is filled with social life economically presented, and Naipaul's technique is brilliant.