With his 14th work of fiction, V.S. Naipaul, 2001 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, balances out an impressive body of writing that also contains 14 works of nonfiction.

One might wonder whether "Magic Seeds" also achieves any kind of balance in Naipaul's often critical and irritating, but also eloquent and provocative, vision of the world.

The Trinidadian writer has mocked postcolonial intellectuals and artists as "mimic men" and apparently has championed the imperial culture of England, where he has lived since 1950.

Yet I have fond memories of his early comic novels set in Trinidad, most prominently "A House for Mr. Biswas," and wanted to like this new one.

As a novel of ideas, a probing investigation of both revolutionary and liberal politics, it will provoke thought and, no doubt, argument.

As a novel in the more conventional sense -- a complex story of characters, their interactions, conflicts and resolutions -- it disappoints.

Writer Willie Chandran, who has lived most of his life far from his native India, was the protagonist of Naipaul's previous novel, "Half a Life." In that story, he was supported by a wife in Africa.

In this sequel, he's supported by his sister Sarojini in Berlin. In fact, it seems that Willie has spent his entire life living off of others.

A documentary filmmaker with an inflated sense of her work's political importance, she berates her brother mercilessly for his unprincipled, unaware lifestyle. He has never espoused a violent cause. When he protests that he is "on the side" of the downtrodden but doesn't feel it's his battle, she hectors him:

"We all have wars to go to," she says, and she questions his worth as a man and a human being for not finding his war.

Taking all this to heart, Willie travels to a jungle training camp for guerrillas in India. Who they are and the nature of their cause remain as complicated to Willie as they are confusing to the reader.

Apparently the revolutionaries are struggling against a millenniums-old caste system and the inequality of the land ownership it protects. But most of the trainees Willie meets are disaffected middle-class men from the higher castes, like himself.

Unsurprisingly, the whole movement has splintered into numerous rival groups with more or less radical agendas and more or less uncompromising leaders and fanatical operatives.

Although he may not learn a great deal about the revolution, for the first time in his life Willie sees the people whom he (and we) normally consider invisible. These are not the fighters but the farmers, laborers and untouchables whom the revolutionaries imagine they're fighting for.

In Naipaul's depiction, they mostly resist their would-be liberators, humbly preferring tradition, however oppressive, to the militants' theories and the uncertainties of social change.

Willie survives on extremely little, apparently finding strength in himself he didn't know he had; on the other hand, he wears his Rolex throughout the ordeal.

And after a series of blunders, including a commander's pointless shooting of three policemen. Willie manages to escape the movement, but only through capture and a 10-year jail sentence.

Petitioning from his English publisher and payoffs eventually get him released, under condition of permanent banishment from India. The final third of the novel follows Willie's adjustment back to the easy life in England, where he relies on the generosity of friends and their rich connections.

If this seems anticlimactic, it isn't; there has been no real climax. Willie's life still strikes us as aimless, although it was, perhaps significantly so, in the forest with the revolutionaries as well.

Naipaul's picture of global politics and economics as they have affected both Europe and Asia leaves us either gasping with nostalgia for clarity and direction or stunned (as the principal English character, Roger, is in the final scene) by a vision of racial integration and intercultural celebration.

Or we can entertain the idea, which Willie wants to share with his ever-idealistic sister, that "It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where everything starts unravelling."

It has always been the project of satirists to make us suspicious of untenably idealistic philosophies and systems. "Magic Seeds," though not obviously satire, exposes many of these impossible desires through an arduous and often beautiful journey through the jungles and suburbs of globalization.