[Fireflies] is a masterpiece. It's a long book … and a reviewer's first inclination, when confronted with a long book, is to see what he can safely skip. It must say something for Mr Naipaul's power that despite a firm determination to skip whole pages and even whole chapters at a time, I was unable to miss a page of his absorbing, inconsequential narrative.

The story … centres around the disintegration of one family in Trinidad's upper-class Indian community. As subjects go, this might not seem to be one which automatically commands a wide readership. Those who approach novel-reading as a vehicle for self-improvement might be prepared to accept some (passionately) involved, committed, compassionate, etc. treatise on the problems of Trinidad's Indians, or even a biting satire on Trinidad's upper class, but a poignant, uncommitted account of what it is to be a conservative, upper-class Trini-dadian Hindu in our present deplorable age is more than most people are prepared to take even in World Conservation Year. I can only report that the book is a delight and a miracle of enjoyment….

Mr Naipaul's own attitude to the society he describes is ambivalent. He satirises its absurdities with conventional rigour but he is also keenly alive to the tragedy of its destruction, and it is this quality which makes his book so exceptional. For an English reader, and most especially, perhaps, for an English conservative, the poignancy is doubly acute because of the extreme unfamiliarity of the society he describes. Various attempts have been made to demonstrate the tragedy of the old order changing in England, and these have met with varied degrees of success….

Suffice to say that anyone who misses reading Shiva Naipaul's Fireflies will miss an entirely delightful experience….

Auberon Waugh, "The Old Order Changeth Not," in The Spectator, Vol. 225, No. 7427, October 31, 1970, p. 526.