In Naipaul's novels we trace the fortunes of the imaginative dreamer, the 'trickster' or fantasist of bookish disposition whose dreams eventually find outlets and leave some small imprint on the world. Such a character is happiest in the rare moments of pure creativity, of the uncomplicated fulfilment of the literary urge. But these manifestations of the literary spirit are paradoxical since, though in the author's eyes they represent a fulfilment, his characters experience them as intense desire. The result of pursuing this desire is, as often as not, a travestying of the original impulse; and this is portrayed by Naipaul in tones which range from the lightest and gayest of ironies to the deepest sense of outrage and disgust. If he shows literacy as civilised man's most powerful instrument of self-assertion, it is at the price of revealing its subjection to all the defeats, distortions and violations imposed on the self by the modern world. (p. 6)

Naipaul's first published novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957), is a comedy of literary and cultural confusion which may be compared with the early Evelyn Waugh (as the author himself has suggested) or, alternatively, with H. G. Wells's The History of Mr Polly. Ganesh Ransumair, the first of a line of literary fantasists, is the traditional pundit or holy man transported to Trinidad, where he becomes masseur, witch-doctor and owner of four hundred volumes of Everyman's Library and two hundred Penguins. His romance with the written word begins, appropriately enough, in the local printing-shop, where he suddenly announces that he intends to write a book:

The boy dabbled some ink on the roller. 'You ever hear of Trinidad people writing books?'

'I writing a book.'

The boy spat into a bin full of ink-stained paper. 'This must be a funny sort of shop, you know. The number of people who come in here and ask me to print the books they writing in invisible ink, man!'

Not only does Ganesh take up the challenge, but he is wily enough to use his literary ambitions to mend an unfortunate marriage, pacify an irate father-in-law, and, finally, to make himself famous all over Trinidad. Starting with 101 Questions and Answers on the Hindu Religion, he writes The Guide to Trinidad to attract off-duty American soldiers to his 'genuine Hindu temple', and then follows up with a whole spate of devotional works such as What God Told Me, The Road to Happiness, Re-Incarnation, and Profitable Evacuation (a treatise on constipation). Renowned as author and pundit, Ganesh makes the inevitable move into the mushroom world of pre-independence Trinidadian politics. Elected to the Legislative Council, he soon sells out to the British, and is finally seen by the narrator, now at Oxford, as one of a party of visiting colonial statesmen; the mystic masseur has been reborn as G. Ramsay Muir, M.B.E.

The Hindu religious background, the sardonic but affectionate viewpoint of the scholarship boy-turned-narrator and the comic trickster-hero whose career epitomises social transition are all features which link The Mystic Masseur to A House for Mr Biswas (1961), the culmination of Naipaul's early fiction and the nearest he has come to writing a popular masterpiece. Among the new elements in Biswas are the theme of slavery, to which William Walsh has pointed in his critical study [V. S. Naipaul], and the conjunction of pastoral comedy with a story that is epic in scale, if not always in manner. Comic detachment is the keynote of a narrative that refers to its hero, even as a baby, as 'Mr' Biswas; yet, as the child of indentured labourers, born 'unnecessary and unaccommodated', Biswas is the first of his family to break with the feudal-capitalist hierarchy and forge an individual identity. Biswas's self-assertion leads him by way of literary fantasy to a respectable social identity; his gift for sensational journalism, brought to fruition by an historical accident, makes him the owner of a car and, finally, of a jerry-built house in Port of Spain. The house, pathetically deprived and imitative as an image of fulfilment from one point of view, is at the same time the culmination of Biswas's dream, symbolizing his emancipation from slavery and from the tyranny of the extended family. To the reader both Biswas's literary output and the returns it brings him are the second-rate merchandise of industrial capitalism; but to him they are the fruits of struggle and rebellion, the signs of such fulfilment as he will be allowed. The novel is punctuated by a series of epic inventories of Biswas's possessions—the Ford Prefect, the hatrack, the Slumberking bed—which serve a brilliant double purpose; familiar and thus contemptible to the reader, they are experienced within the fictional context as if they had come into existence for the first time.

In part the attraction of A House for Mr Biswas must be put down to the 'element of nostalgia', which Naipaul has noted in the continuing popularity of nineteenth-century fiction. Like George Eliot's Loamshire and Hardy's Wessex, the Trinidad of Biswas is a literary construction with the imaginative fullness of a childhood memory. As most critics have noted, this is a conservative novel, employing the conventions of retrospective realism to present a world of vividly-drawn characters whose reality is taken for granted. That the marvellously inventive dialogue, the minimum of authorial commentary and near-complete absence of landscape description are themselves the products of stylisation is shown by the complete contrast between Biswas and The Mimic Men, Naipaul's next Caribbean novel and the expression of an alienated, rather than an immanent vision. And, despite appearances, Biswas is by no means without narrative self-consciousness. The inventory of the house at the beginning connects naturally with the résumé of Biswas's career and memories at the end. The absent space between end and beginning is that in which we may imagine Anand, Mr Biswas's scholarship-winning son, revisiting the 'empty house' after his father's death and finding there the midden-heap that enables him to reconstruct the past from Anand's point of view, the novel is (as one or two brief passages intimate) an almost Proustian recovery of lost time. A House for Mr Biswas is at once a founding epic of contemporary Trinidad and the work of a novelist profoundly aware of his own lateness in the tradition of European realism.

Biswas does not exactly end up a contented man—he is too dyspeptic, too self-pitying and too fond of reading Marcus Aurelius for that—but at least he has extracted himself from the void of non-identity and known the satisfaction of sublimating his desires into an acceptable form of creative expression. His literary 'career' begins with lettering and sign-painting, and proceeds by way of romantic stories about 'barren heroines' until he discovers his own skittish and outrageous brand of investigative journalism. 'Daddy comes home in a coffin', the story which gains him a regular job on the Trinidad Sentinel, is wish-fulfilment in the guise of lugubrious comedy, while his series of interviews with Deserving Destitutes bolsters up a personal myth of Samuel Smiles-like success won in bitter defiance of his wife's family.

Literary culture in Biswas is a benign force, as the world which it promises really exists; even the seaside picnic with overflowing hampers that is the subject of one of Anand's school compositions eventually comes true. For all the reminders of slavery in the background, the result is a strikingly innocent work, a 'social history' of modern Trinidad serenely unaware of the real history of brutality, exploitation and racial tension in the Caribbean that Naipaul went on to portray in The Mimic Men, Guerillas and, most notably, in his historical study The Loss of El Dorado (1969). Unmindful of this history, Mr Biswas makes his personal rebellion without incurring the self-violation, and the violation of others, that account for the acrid tone of the later novels. (pp. 7-9)