It would be polite but ridiculous to talk about Shiva Naipaul as if he had leapt, full-armed and sui generis, into a literary world miraculously swept of all footprints of his famous brother V. S…. The relationship between the two is fraternal in much the same sense as that between Chekhov and Gorky. Like Chekhov, the elder Naipaul works from a fastidious, ironic private sensibility to humane public conclusions: because people behave badly, the world needs changing. The younger, more sweeping and less fastidious, starts where his brother ends: because the world needs changing, people behave badly. Bred within the old imperial culture, V. S. Naipaul sees its failure as one of individual wills, brains, imaginations. For his brother, born in 1945, it is the culture that blights the brains and wills. Like Gorky, he's fascinated by the perverse energies of primitive capitalism, the ferocious battling for a better life which, re-channelled, could transform society. In its raw appetite, depressing to his brother, he finds back-handed hope. For its casualties, pitiful and exasperating to the elder Naipaul in their self-delusion, he has only pity.

An image for their striving gives [The Chip-Chip Gatherers] its title. Chip-Chip are tiny shellfish which bed themselves just below the tide-line of Trinidad's Atlantic beaches…. Only in an utterly impoverished society, Naipaul implies, could they be a delicacy.

That is how the people of the novel survive. Egbert Ramsaran, founder of the Ramsaran Transport Company, maintains his ramshackle lorries by lending money at high interest to his former neighbours in the Settlement, a straggling village lost in mud and sugar-cane. They console themselves with the idea that one of themselves has escaped to the great, affluent world, and the hope that his heir, Wilbert, may marry one of their daughters. But Wilbert knows he is as much a prisoner as they. His educated cousin Julian is ruthless enough to shed family and sweetheart for a scholarship to England. But Wilbert stays trapped in the cannibal web of kinship, feeding on the tiny, marooned lives which also feed on him.

Shiva Naipaul's broader certainties make his style less fastidious than his brother's—he's fond of Dickensian rotundities and character-labelling tags—but his construction is if anything more magisterial. He marshals disclosures like a chess master; perhaps his finest is the chapter in which Julian's sweetheart, who has never allowed herself to hope while hope remained, surrenders finally to fantasy as she goes off to spinsterhood and a clerical job in Port-of-Spain. Oddly, it's this moment, closer to Chekhov than to Gorky, which proclaims most clearly a talent comparable with his brother's, but wholly distinct from it.