V.S. Naipaul may be the greatest unsilly comic writer in English. Like a classic English example of the genre, Mr. Naipaul’s 14th novel ends with a wedding. But Willie Somerset Chandran hardly knows the happy pair; he is, as ever in Naipaul, an outsider.

“Magic Seeds” (Knopf, 288 pages, $25) extends Willie’s life story as originally set out in the now appropriately named “Half a Life” (2002). In that novel, Mr. Naipaul pursued his old themes, of the “half and half world,” where the colonial may, at least nominally, cross over into versions of the white man’s world. By the end of the novel Willie was living as a psuedo-landowner in revolutionary Mozambique. In “Magic Seeds,” Willie tries the opposite approach.

After fleeing Africa for Berlin, where he stays with his revolutionary sister, Willie begins to read Gandhi. He experiences “a new kind of emotional life.” His half-and-half life becomes more dialectical: “One world was ordered, settled, its wars fought. … In the other world people were more frantic. They were desperate to enter the simpler, ordered world.” Willie returns to native India and actually becomes a guerrilla revolutionary.

For a while, Mr. Naipaul’s book seems a case study in the seductions of terrorism. Aimless Willie nobilizes himself. In one short paragraph, Mr. Naipaul outlines the wizardry of heroic discipline: “He lived intensely; he became absorbed in himself. He found he had begun to deal with time.” But as Willie gets to know his fellow insurgents, Mr. Naipaul turns his tale against him. His nerve and happiness fail. Even at the height of Willie’s self-possession, Mr. Naipaul savages him with brilliant sympathy. Befuddled by the local bazaar, Willie, “in his new mood,” thinks, “What ritual, what beauty.”

It is hard, in Mr. Naipaul’s world, to know what or whom to like. Characters like Willie Chandran are so impeccably feckless that their tragedies seem, if not accidental, impersonal – precise reflections of a complicated and betraying world. Willie loses everything he embraces, and by the novel’s end beauty is treated as just another magic seed, like revolution, for which the proverbial peasant boy trades a worthy cow. “It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.”

When Willie consolidates his disillusionment so, it is hard to root for him, but also hard to think that he is wrong. Furthermore, this is an important part of Mr. Naipaul’s engagement with terrorism in this book. It is good to understand our enemies, and Mr. Naipaul is in a position to do so. The author’s ideological aloofness finds earthly expression, as humble Willie requests to be celled separately from his fellow political prisoners, who enjoy comfort privileges but insist on group studies of Lenin and Mao.

Mr. Naipaul is indeed snugly in line with the tradition of English novelists like Dickens and Forster, whose narrow characters draw out the world’s contradictions more clearly than complex characters would. Mr. Naipaul does less than those authors to make his narrow characters caricatures, which is usually good but here is not. For Willie Chandran is not particularly compelling, and thus Mr. Naipaul’s ambition as a political writer hangs like a sparkling veil over Willie’s blank face.

“Half a Life” and “Magic Seeds” are imaginative works, less autobiographical than Naipaul classics like “A House for Mr. Biswas.” In this thoroughly fictional mode, Naipaul gives his Willie a preternatural self-consciousness. For an uncalculating person with highly flexible emotions and the most fleeting plans for his life, he is amazingly self-aware. His thoughts appear as quoted dialog, delivered on the spot. These unlikely, aphoristic sentences are often the richest in the novel, but are far from naturalistic.

Mr. Naipaul has Willie, particularly conscious of the differences between a white worldview and his own in this novel, repeatedly consider his failure to appreciate writers such as Hemingway, “who was very far away from me, who had nothing to offer me.” Mr. Naipaul’s post-colonial settings will feel similarly closed to some readers. The second half of this novel, set in London, opens like a flower: As if to underline the different opportunities of European fiction, Mr. Naipaul includes a long and wonderful chapter told entirely by Willie’s white lawyer friend, Roger.

Roger’s story, which previously appeared as the short story “Suckers,” is a disquisition on the half-and-half life, as experienced in an affair with a lower-class woman. It stands out, as if on a platter, proving that Mr. Naipaul’s themes shine through no matter what the setting.