[Shiva Naipaul's] novels have dealt with a world where feeling has gone dead from despair and helplessness. He draws with the utmost precision a picture of the backwoods of Trinidad, and a people obsessed with the earnest, lifelong struggle to climb into the lower middle class. (p. 25)

Fireflies was a heavily documentary family saga, rather flatly constructed, but at the same time it was an utterly original book; the impression its abundant detail made was unforgettable. If Shiva Naipaul seemed never quite to get inside his characters, that is because he thought there was straw inside them. They were without some indefinable essential part of man. He wrote like a sociologist, unstylishly, at great length and with academic coldness. Still, for whatever reasons, Fireflies was a runaway success. It was certainly a most promising first book although it reads now as if it were written with suppressed passion by a writer who was a quarter poet, forcing himself into social science, hardly by a novelist at all.

By the end of The Chip-Chip Gatherers, that reservation dissolves. He still specialises in characters whose feelings have gone dead. Liberation, if it ever arrives, comes too late to matter…. But the novelist's ear for dialogue, and the fluent, truthful movement of one scene into another, which differs from family saga as history does from chronicle, and the brilliant spare delineation of certain scenes and characters, make this a novel in a new sense. Fireflies was more than promising in more than one direction. But The Chip-Chip Gatherers reveals glimpses of a rapid and wonderful novelist.

Since then we have been starved. In 1973, Shiva Naipaul was 28; we have had no more novels from him…. But Shiva Naipaul's two documentary books, North of South (1978), a sharply sardonic travel book about Africa, and Black and White (1980), about Guyana and the mass suicide under Jim Jones, are so extremely good that if we have lost a novelist we have still gained a writer who is now much more than promising. (pp. 25-6)

And yet one has the sense with Shiva Naipaul, in Black and White particularly, that he is still feeling his way…. [He] deals swiftly and powerfully with many themes a novelist might use. His eye for detail, his wry observation of character and his ear for dialogue are as remarkable as ever. He is still able to plunge himself into the lower depths of a society as thoroughly now as in the days of Fireflies. What he is doing is not quite reportage; as Pater said of the other arts striving towards the condition of music, all Shiva Naipaul's books tend towards a novel.

In Black and White he casts a beady eye on a number of extremist groups on the West Coast that lurk in the background of the Jim Jones movement. This is investigative journalism, the last infirmity of men of letters, who are often better at it than regular journalists. It is the closest they can come to action. Shiva Naipaul's eye is admirably bleak. He is still fascinated by those whose lives are a nonsense. 'They are redundant. They are good for nothing. They do not even evoke fellow feeling'. And yet he writes from the very strong position of a thoroughly prejudiced and scornful humanist with unlimited curiosity. What rules his writing now is a sense of determining structure, the curve of a story, the hammer-blow of an explanation. He has always produced significant details, like a man picking winkles out of shells, but he has become a more controlled writer as time has gone by….

Shiva Naipaul's close relation with Trinidad has meant a burden of love-hate which he might be glad to forget. Yet the only oracles that Apollo offers to writers are Dig deeper, and Know thyself. (p. 26)