In The Pleasures of Exile George Lamming scolded V. S. Naipaul, as he no doubt would his younger brother Shiva, for taking too soft a line on Trinidadian social conditions, for being smug when he ought to be angry, for writing 'castrated satire'…. What the Naipauls write is irony, not satire, and irony is by definition non-militant…. Caribbean social conditions have for them, qua novelists, an imaginative significance only.

It is true that a primitive society offers a Hobson's choice of styles to its authors: tantrumese, noble-savagery, or a combination of irony and pathos. But like all limitations this brings special liberties. Irony and pathos are essentially downward-looking viewpoints, so a society of grotesques, fools, snobs, show-offs, martinets and ingenues who think and talk in illiterate clichés has obvious perks for a writer with as delicate a touch as Shiva Naipaul…. Although Mr Naipaul must, so to speak, keep his distance, this doesn't cut off sympathy but creates an undertow of restrained emotion…. The compassion is there in the sheer quality of the writing and never has to become explicit….

[The Chip-Chip Gatherers, like Fireflies], is predominantly concerned with one question about Trinidadian life: what happens when a backward people starts to educate itself? The most imaginatively appealing answer is that the old 'atavistic' instincts are not transcended, merely adulterated: what used to express itself in abuse and beatings turns into inarticulate malice; worry becomes anxiety, nostalgia becomes regret, apathy becomes morbidity, vague aspiration becomes obsessive ambition. This, like so much else, can best be observed through child-parent relationships, and Mr Naipaul again requires a broad canvas and a 40-year period in which to examine it….

If the book isn't quite as successful as the startlingly mature Fireflies, it is because Mr Naipaul has started to deal with the problem of focus. He is concentrating on nuance rather than ambiance, shaving down his sentences, and holding his vast—perhaps Dickensian—comic talents carefully in check. But for a writer in his twenties these are further precocities, not constraints, and there can be little doubt that his next novels will establish him as one of the most accomplished, and most accessible, writers of his generation.