The Mimic Men: A comprehensive review
Imagine. You are living a life with no worries; you have a happy family; you even start to become active in your community. Then your country trades hands in a political sense, and you are left in a country which feels unknown to you. To make matters worse, you get kicked out of the country. You’re forced to relocate to some distant place which is also unknown to you. V.S. Naipaul takes us through this very situation as he combat’s social insecurity in the midst of understanding what has happened to his homeland.
  In the Mimic Men, V.S. Naipaul lays out the story of Ralph Singh, a former high ranking political figure who is exiled from his homeland, Isabella, and forced to immigrate to London. While the ordinary man would consider this a dream come true, Singh feels abandoned. Not only is he forced to reside in a third class London hotel but faces difficulty overcoming the cultural differences. With nothing else to do, he writes this post-colonial novel in London to explain how the country that he grew up in, no longer exists as it has been decolonized, converting it into a country that is foreign to him.
Throughout the book Singh often reflects -- in the form of flashbacks -- on his life in Isabella, where again, he was the “outsider” as he is of Indian origin. To fit in, he even changed his name from Ranjit to Ralph at a young age and “feared discovery” (P. 113) by his classmates because he thought that his indian name would him unlike his peers. Unfortunately, his mother, who portrayed herself as a modernized wealthy lady, supported this “modernization” paradox. Due to this mindset that Singh adopted at an early age, he shaped his character around the objective of being “the easiest and most attractive” (P. 24) person. This meant that you followed everyone else, including the somewhat benign colonizers. In retrospect, while this mindset did made Singh a wealthy individual, he found it to be foolish. He realized that it was not money, or your name or the amount of things you have or the house you live in that dictates your character. Rather, you do. (Although one may argue that Singh, on a sub-conscious level, still does not understand this notion as it is fairly evident that he still is a racist and sexist narcissist.)
The novel takes a sharp turn when Isabella is de-colonized and a new government is established. While the newer generations were commemorating, Singh failed to feel the “independence” his country had just gained. He is so accustomed to having a colonizer that he cannot become his own man. He views remained pessimistic on the country’s future because he could not capture the whole picture. He was unable to view life without his colonizers, when in actuality he could have become that same leader that he longed for. 
Overall, Naipaul successfully illustrates the effects of colonization on the common citizen. By creating a man who is the complete opposite of what society desires, Naipaul presents the idea, in a subtle manner, that colonization is toxic. And, that change is possible, but not necessarily easy. I suppose one could say that Naipaul offers a new addition to the concept of “Starting from the Bottom” by adding a stairwell back down (Of course, only for the politicians).