Poor Willie Chandran. He is the main character in Magic Seeds, the 14th work of fiction by V. S. Naipaul. Chandran also held centre stage in 2001's Half a Life, a novel whose title can, it turns out, be taken literally. For many a literary creation, the immortality ensured by starring in two books by a Nobel Prize winner would be compensation for any discomforts incurred on the page. Especially, perhaps, when that laureate is proclaiming his work as a novelist finished, something he has, admittedly, claimed before.

But surely Willie Chandran wanted more for his full life than to dwell from cradle to grave within the fortress of Naipaulian determinism, a system of intellectual distemper that posits most men as hapless and mediocre and the majority of women as virtually non-existent. Chandran may have assumed that two volumes of fiction would provide him some material for an escape plan. He may have thought the dictates of good writing alone – fresh ideas, unexpected turns – would be his liberator.

Wrong. Magic Seeds, a novel of careful craft and reckless pessimism, goes one better than Half a Life on several counts, none of them cheering. Where there was comedy in the earlier book, a welcome return to the tone of the younger V. S. Naipaul, there is scarcely a smile to be drawn from the new novel.

Where Chandran, a Stendhalian drifter obliged to wander in a cloud of his own delusions, is barely 40 at the end of the first narrative, with plenty of time to wise up and see clearly, Magic Seeds advances him into late middle life with an acute self-consciousness about his plight, but no less hazy a sense of direction.

Chandran, in short, just talks and talks about being lost while dutifully carrying on in the "darkness in which everybody walked." You have to feel for the character. He probably had modest hopes for his golden years.

The novel opens with a scold and finishes with a whimper. Willie Chandran's sister, Sarojini, a documentary filmmaker in Berlin, is haranguing her sibling about his wastrel tendencies. "We all have wars to go to," she says. Sarojini has recently filmed the Indian revolutionary Kandapalli. The war she advocates is the one implicating their own shared ancestry: the caste-class struggle in India, where both were born and raised.

He takes her scolding seriously, and heads back to the ancestral homeland to find Kandapalli and join his movement. Though it is never fixed, we seem to be in the upheaval and violence of l970s India, possibly among the Naxalite insurgents in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Soon enough it is obvious we are also in India: A Wounded Civilization, first published in 1977 and by far the most excoriating of the author's four non-fiction books about his own ancestral land. Still the innocent at 41, Chandran drifts straight into that war, believing his involvement will lend purpose to his existence.

His misadventures among the revolutionaries are predictably squalid. More to Naipaul's point, they are pointless, men being men and India being India. "I have so many sources of shame," Chandran confesses shortly before he finally surrenders to the police after years of hiding in the bush. Several more seasons in an Indian prison are brought to a close by the intervention of an old English friend, a lawyer who arranges his freedom from one jail in order to cast him in another: the London of ugly sprawl and plebian culture and more "mimic men" than you can count in a national census.

Everywhere Willie Chandran looks, in fact, he finds Naipaul's disappointment. No surprise, the characters in Magic Seeds, whether Indian peasants or English aristocrats, express themselves in cadenced paragraphs of confessional prose. That they all sound pretty much alike is one problem. That the more educated and, generally speaking, white among them seem to articulate outrageous and often silly views similar to those held by Naipaul himself is another. The novel is best read as a humourless Beckettian monologue, with Sir Vidia chattering on like the unnameable.

Why, then, is this cranky tract so exhilarating? Granted, many readers will not find it to be that way. But the book is far from bereft of conventional satisfactions. As always with Naipaul, the prose is muscular and precise. Descriptions of rural India, of village rhythms at their most elemental, are lush and evocative. As well, for all his impatience with character, the author possesses rare insights into the hearts of men made desperate by circumstance. His sketches of those insurgents are so clear and exacting they wind up evincing compassion.

There are also the distinct pleasures afforded by late books by major authors. No one should pick up Magic Seeds as an introduction to Naipaul. Neither, however, would Beethoven's late string quartets, written after the composer went deaf, be the place to begin appreciating his music. Artists often cut to the emotional and stylistic quick in the twilights of their careers, as though admirers can, if they so wish, consult earlier novels or musical scores to observe more measured displays of craft.

For sure, the ending of this novel seems a spiteful deflation, right down to its final line, suggesting that Willie Chandran mustn't be allowed to conclude even a sentence with dignity.

Poor man. No one gets out of Naipaul's fortress alive.