Before coming to a key work by a writer who has been publishing since the late fifties, I wish to stitch together from various materials an impression of the context in which his art can be seen (inevitably from an English point of view—but then, from what he has recently written, Naipaul still seems to care about England).¹

In his autobiographical essay, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York, 2000), V. S. Naipaul in a particularly arresting paragraph recalls the pressures that drove him at a stage in his life into writing his travel books:

Fiction had taken me as far as it could go. There were certain things it couldn't deal with. It couldn't deal with my years in England; there was no social depth to the experience; it seemed more a matter for autobiography. And it couldn't deal with my growing knowledge of the wider world. Fiction, by its nature, functioning best within certain fixed social boundaries, seemed to be pushing me back to worlds—like the island world, or the world of my childhood—smaller than the one I inhabited. Fiction, which had once liberated me and enlightened me, now seemed to be pushing me towards being simpler than I really was. For some years—three, perhaps four—I didn't really know how to move; I was quite lost.

Of course, countless writers have undergone versions of such a ‘fictional crisis’. Naipaul's depiction of his position in what he clearly sees as a turning-point in his life is lucidly honest. At best, when he was at that time capable of turning experience into art, he became trapped by the narrowness of the society or world he was confined to, or else circumscribed by the restrictions of his own situation in an alien society which he did not understand. These are recollections about a man between cultures struggling in his early thirties with the expression of a personal identity. I mean identity as man and as the writer who became involved in much of his works with people who are ‘quite lost’.

About his childhood in Trinidad he once said:

When I was in the fourth form, I wrote a vow on the endpapers of my Kennedy Revised Latin Primer to leave within five years. I left after six.²

One places this beside the loaded phrase ‘my growing knowledge of the wider world’ (of the first quote) to understand the essence of the writer, who had tried comedy as with A House for Mr. Biswas (1961),³ and was travelling farther while acutely conscious of his background. Naipaul had been living in England since 1950, and this was a period when the great English tradition of the novel was waning, or to be brutally honest, had long waned. And in ‘Jasmine’, an essay published in The Times Literary Supplement of 4 June 1964, collected in The Overcrowded Barracoon (1984), we see that the Oxford University English course he had studied on a scholarship in the early fifties had ‘little to do with literature’, being selectively historical and scholarly (with Anglo-Saxon)—so of no use to him.⁴

In his recalled predicament (in Reading and Writing) of (temporarily) abandoning fiction for travel books, he is close to reducing it to the conservative model of the novels of Jane Austen,⁵ where a narrow social world is accurately described. In this essay he (among others) mentions Charles Dickens, an island novelist of world fame, D. H. Lawrence, who tried to break away from his little island, and Joseph Conrad, a wanderer and voyager who settled on one to write fiction. These also all wrote travel books as well as fiction. However, one cannot imagine any of these pioneers, who extended the English novel well beyond Jane Austen in their idiosyncratic ways, as rejecting fiction for being too narrow! In this respect, Naipaul then felt more alien to English society of the time and more frustrated by an English conception of fiction than even the Polish emigré Joseph Conrad, who once in a letter bitterly ascribed the commercial failure of his novel The Secret Agent to his ‘foreignness’.

Naipaul's position in England in the late fifties was cruelly difficult—and he has referred to the early fifties as ‘very hard years’.⁶ In ‘London’, a short article printed in The Times Literary Supplement of 15 August 1958, and the first piece collected in The Overcrowded Barracoon, he outlines his circumstances at the time. He is living in England and depends on an English audience, and is writing about Trinidad. As he says (simply and moving), at that time he is writing for England. He has written three books in five years which have not sold well, for the public do not want him because he is ‘too foreign’, while the Americans don't want him because he is ‘too British’. ‘People have been used to reading about non-Europeans through European eyes’, he observes, and they do not know the novels of the Indian writer R. K. Narayan, and so have no point of reference for his own novels.⁷ It appears that only his journalism is paying—and earlier he had done B.B.C. broadcasting (among other things, of some of his short stories). He says that he has been urged to write about England instead, and would like to do so, but does not know enough about it. Anyway, for someone in his position, in England ‘everything goes on behind closed doors’. Thirty years later he would have had a real chance to have been accepted on his own terms, one feels, for the literary climate with respect to other cultures was to radically change, as ‘postcolonial literature’ became appreciated. But in this piece he is putting a brave face on things. From his journalistic activities of this period, one can see that though he is finding his voice (some late-sixties/early-seventies pieces still read like Graham Greene), he is a fresh talent with a cultural diversity (within certain clear parameters and ethnic bias) that is international. He ends by prophetically saying that while London ‘is the best place to write in’, he needs to be able to refresh himself by travel. In 1961 Naipaul received a grant from the Trinidad government to travel in the Caribbean. Then followed a long period of travelling widely.

Returning to Reading and Writing, Naipaul mentions 1955 as the year of his initial literary breakthrough, when he was (more than coincidentally) able to understand Evelyn Waugh's definition of fiction (in the dedication to Officers and Gentlemen) as ‘experience totally transformed’. Naipaul also tells us how, when he encountered Joseph Conrad's generous letter of advice to Edward Noble (of 28 October 1895) about a novel he had been sent, he realised that he himself during his formative years had shared the same view of literature not being a mere mechanism of plot, a series of accidents:

For Conrad, as for the narrator of Under Western Eyes, the discovery of every tale was a moral one. It was for me too, without my knowing it.⁸

Whatever his present attitude to ‘the novel’ (which I will return to finally),⁹ whenever he has employed the form (with whatever success, in whatever variety), he has taken it seriously, unlike the metafictionists, who have toyed with it.

Naipaul's father had once advised him to read Conrad ‘for intensity of expression’.¹⁰ One adds to this his piece ‘Conrad's Darkness’, originally published in July 1974 in The New York Review of Books, which appeared in The Return of Eva Péron with The Killings on Trinidad (1980). Here, beyond saying that he (surprisingly and disappointingly) never got beyond the opening pages of Nostromo, for him Conrad was Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, and, understandably from his own fiction like Guerillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979), the extreme, pessimistic allegory Heart of Darkness.

Naipaul goes further in Reading and Writing to categorise the travel books that he knew at that early period of self-struggle as being written by ‘metropolitan people’ unlike himself, such as ‘Huxley, Lawrence, Waugh’:

They wrote at a time of empire; whatever their character at home, they inevitably in their travel became semi-imperial, using the accidents of travel to define their metropolitan personalities against a foreign background.

My travel was not like that. I was a colonial travelling in New World plantation colonies which were like the one I had grown up in. To look, as a visitor, at other semiderelict communities in despoiled land, in the great romantic setting of the New World, was to see, as from a distance, what one's own community might have looked like. It was to be taken out of oneself and one's immediate circumstances—the material of fiction—and to have a new vision of what one had been born into, and to have an intimation of a sequence of historical events going far back.

Perhaps this distinction is not fair to Lawrence, really an ‘anti-metropolitan personality’, in fact, whose travel books in places surely go beyond his ‘semi-imperial’(!) identity in a leap of perceptive intelligence; but one sees what he means with Waugh. Put Naipaul's An Area of Darkness (1964) next to Waugh's When the Going Was Good (1946), and while one suspects that Naipaul may have learned from Waugh's travel book (especially its humour), the voices and experiences of the two narrators are completely different, notably in the understanding of and attitudes to people and cultures. To cite a clear instance, Naipaul's observer's independence is threatened, almost overwhelmed by a Sikh's challenge in a way that never happens to Waugh, whether faced by fellow whites, or a victim of a mad Brazilian planter, or when he is thrown off an African steamer by an infuriated captain. And Naipaul is not pretending to be a ‘metropolitan person’ with an assured centre; he can take over Indian voices, and when he returns to London he feels that ‘my experience of India’ is now defining itself ‘more properly against my own homelessness’. Through detachment he is trying to estimate the nature of India, the English rule of India, and the difference between the English colonisation of Trinidad and India. In his evaluation he has been trying to define himself:

To preserve conception of India as a country still whole, historical facts had not been suppressed. They had been acknowledged and ignored; and it was only in India that I was able to see this as part of the Indian ability to retreat, the ability genuinely not to see what was obvious: with others a foundation of neurosis, but with Indians only part of a greater philosophy of despair, leading to passivity, detachment, acceptance. It is only now, as the impatience of the observer is dissipated in the process of writing and self-inquiry, that I see how much this philosophy had also been mine. It had enabled me, through the stresses of a long residence in England, to withdraw completely from nationality and loyalties except to persons; it had made me content to be myself alone, my work, my name (the last two so different from the first); it had convinced me that every man was an island, and taught me to shield all that I knew to be good and pure within myself from the corruption of causes.

Naipaul was, and at best still is, in a sympathetically judicious, but vulnerable observer's position—which does not preclude disgust or ironic aloofness and even superiority. This last is a defect that can crop up in certain contexts—just as Naipaul is sometimes not really a critic when writing on English authors such as Dickens, for example. He tends with confidence to understand Dickens only in terms relating to a period in his own development, and seems not to appreciate that ‘realism’ can include psychological realism. And a surgical attitude towards the ‘human material’ in some studies may understandably cause offence.¹¹ But in his best creative writing (and one includes some of his travel and his historical books here, though these were not written for quite the same purpose) Naipaul's position is also the main strength behind his perception. It is tied to his method of inquiry and is the basis of his originality.

In a witty and subtle review article (‘The Last of the Aryans’) on the Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri (known for his A Passage to England), first published in the January 1966 issue of Encounter, and also collected in The Overcrowded Barracoon, Naipaul makes the following diagnosis from a passage in Chaudhuri's The Continent of Circe:

It might seem then that Chaudhuri, in an attempt to make a whole of Hindu attitudes, has succumbed to any number of Hindu contradictions. But I also feel that Chaudhuri, living in Delhi, enduring slights and persecutions, has at last succumbed to what we may call the enemy. He sees India as too big; he has lost his gift of detachment, his world view.

This is plainly a judgement telling us about Naipaul's personal understanding of a predicament, and carries a conviction beyond fascinating echoes of E. M. Forster's perceptions in A Passage to India of how India overwhelms. It tells us especially about the value of a detachment related to a ‘world view’ for Naipaul at the time (and later!).¹²

In a most recent piece, in the August 2000 issue of the Tatler, Naipaul attacks the aggressively plebeian and anti-elitist climate under Tony Blair in England, a country which he (with reason) sees has been destroying its values for the last fifty years. The names one picks out among the British figures he cites from the past as men who had serious ideas about civilisation are Waugh and Orwell. Orwell (who like Naipaul had done broadcasting for the B.B.C.) was, I think, a better essayist and journalist than novelist. There is something sterile and more than something claustrophobic about many of his novels. But the impressive side of Orwell, his non-partisan liberal individualism, which refused to swallow cant from any side, as evidenced in Homage to Catalonia or the story ‘Shooting an Elephant’, must have struck a chord in Naipaul. And Orwell in his way was very much concerned with India, as Naipaul has been. Orwell had reacted to colonialism from the other side. Being an uprooted Englishman, who had renounced his preparation for a mindless imperialist existence climaxed by a job in the Burma Police, a man who turned against his middle-class background to the working man, but who could not swallow Communism, Orwell was an eternal outsider with a sense of guilt beyond anything Naipaul may have felt in going outside the culture of his birthplace and family. This we see in his novel attempts, in A Clergyman's Daughter and Coming Up for Air, where a country is viewed, past and present, from an alienated and cut-off narrative vision. Orwell used to assume Sherlock Holmes (‘The Great Master of’) disguises to mix with English tramps and hop-pickers, not just to get material, but to lose his own class. And Orwell turned to using Henry Mayhew's 19th century invention of documentary reporting for his studies of low life in books like Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. These are decent, feeling protests against society, and travel books in their modest way, if hardly comparing with the range and imaginative depth of understanding achieved by Naipaul in his travel writing about India.

So perhaps Orwell connects with a formative stage in Naipaul's own life when he viewed England from outside in the fifties and early sixties, looking for what he found congenial in it in his characteristic ‘all-devouring’ way, before he ‘invented himself’ as a writer¹³ by finding methods and developing emotional, cultural and intellectual interests which could bring depth to his curiously vulnerable yet detached position. One can appreciate the journey of Naipaul's development from comparing the English setting in The Mimic Men (1967) with the mellower (but still detached) The Enigma of Arrival (1987), always remembering that Naipaul is much more of a novelist than Orwell, and is not encumbered by Orwell's total sense of guilt and self-disgust, which tends to dwell on a masochistic view of a human condition of being trapped in society.

The danger for Naipaul seems to be that in building up his articulate and intellectual observer's position, there is a dislocation between his past inner vulnerability and his sense of an almost logical mastery of cultural material. In contrast, Orwell's strength lies in his humility, but in creative writing the outsider's vision revealingly connects Naipaul with Orwell as well as with Conrad. Naipaul's narrative figure of the coastal trader Salim (from an Indian family who is in the East African country of A Bend in the River [1979]) is a passive and flawed observer. This narrator of one of his most successful novels may be a convincing extension of Naipaul's voice—the vision is original—but the reader who knows his Conrad and Orwell will remember the Orwellian observer-protagonist (Winston Smith being the most vivid) and Conrad's Marlow, and feel that Naipaul's ‘The Big Man’ president is a more complete and suggestive rendering of the chaos and corruption of power than Big Brother,¹⁴ and set in a far more pointed context.

A Way in the World (1994) concentrates on a central ‘objective’ examination of uprooted people, much as his 1971 Booker Prize-winning sequence of five works In a Free State was concerned with the same study. This is very much Naipaul's niche as a traveller-observer writer who turns to fiction. A Way in the World seems to sum up most of Naipaul's writing career, given that comedy has been left behind. It may be said to be the culmination of a lifetime's endeavour, for it is a fusion of genres and interests: in it we find Naipaul's own life transformed into fiction, his travel interests and preoccupations, his involvement with people, his fascination with the pattern of experience of certain types of individual, his ideas about oppressor and oppressed, and his historical research. So we read about significant episodes in his life in the Caribbean and in England, we meet voices of travellers and explorers out of history like the Venezuelan Francisco Miranda and Sir Walter Raleigh, and we encounter postcolonial Africa in a vision that Conrad would have understood. Naipaul's historical research into nineteenth-century English rule of Trinidad in The Loss of El Dorado: A History (1970) clearly informs the section ‘In the Gulf of Desolation’; this historical grasp of the life of Miranda, con-man and adventurer of colonial times, is turned into a central narrative in a book comprised of a web of moral (but not moralistic) tales interlocking together.

This ‘interlocking’ is both extremely simple and subtly effective. The simple nature is obvious; characters like Blair, the Marxist revolutionary Lebrun (who had written an impressive history which included a study of Miranda), and the Englishman Foster Morris (who had met Lebrun) prove to be more than accidental encounters in the narrator's life, and help to flesh out the sense of destiny behind the tales; one might call it the classic story-teller's method of ‘controlled coincidence’ for deeper purposes. More importantly, these various studies and fragments connect together through the author's underlying vision, which goes with his interest in people and history. So the first two sections, ‘An Inheritance’ and ‘History’, convey the author's childhood and adolescent memories of Trinidad, but involve the reader in currents and interests that shaped his life. The fascination for the Mohammedan Indian Leonard Side, ‘a decorator of cakes and arranger of flowers’ (who dressed Christian bodies in a funeral parlour and had a picture of Christ in his house) introduces a characteristic note in the book; incongruities in people began to strike Naipaul early in his life (fictionalised account or not), and he wished to understand them in their environment. In the case of the civil servant Blair, whom the narrator encounters (in the second section) as a seventeen-year-old junior clerk in the Registrar-General's Department, Port of Spain, it is more than this; the book makes it clear that Blair will die violently twenty years later in another function in East Africa. The man's career and the nature of his identity over a period of changes are what preoccupy Naipaul, and will preoccupy him with other characters, including famous historical figures.

Midway in the second section, when as a youth he is trying to write sketches about Port of Spain life, Naipaul articulates with hindsight the confused doubts he had at the time:

What was the basis of the writer's attitude? What other world did he know, what other experience did he bring to his way of looking? How could a writer write about this world, if it was the only world he knew?

It is not for nothing that we are told that in the vault of the government building where he worked were lodged:

All the records of the colony […], all the births, deaths, deeds, transfers of property and slaves, all the life of the island for the century and a half of the colonial time.

For as the section unfolds, the sense of the past takes over the narrative, along with the cruelty of a changing, rootless present:

It was as though, with the colonial past, all the colonial landscape was being trampled over and undone; as though, with that past, the very idea of regulation had been rejected; as though, after the sacrament of the square, the energy of revolt had become a thing on its own, eating away at the land.

The section ends with the spasms of violence in recent Trinidadian history echoing the pattern of events from the beginnings of the Spanish colonisation in the sixteenth century and the English rule in the nineteenth.

A Way in the World focusses on this sense of layers of history behind the predicament of the individual. So ‘Passenger’ portrays the narrator's gathering comprehension both of himself and of a (fictitious) novelist called Foster Morris.¹⁵ This Englishman when in Trinidad in the late thirties had written a novel about local events as if the people there were English, not understanding their way of seeing or their ‘deprivation’:

We didn't have backgrounds. We didn't have a past. For most of us the past stopped with our grandparents; beyond that was a blank.¹⁶

Morris had given the narrator valuable advice when he had started his own writing career, but now he comes to understand that there is a menace behind Morris's behaviour to him relating to Morris's fossilized ‘liberalism’, which causes a cynical malice defined by the story. This sense of threat and hostility is very potent; Naipaul is good in his touchy, spiky way at conveying ‘bad vibes’ (he once in 1982 as star guest walked out of a PEN conference in Amsterdam). But the narrator places Morris's Trinidad novel as part of ‘the great chain of changing outside vision of that part of the world’ which is ‘a fair record of one side of a civilisation’. Perhaps E. M. Forster himself could have transcended his Englishness to write a novel under West Indian conditions that might have been even ‘fairer’!

The study of the Trinidadian-Panamanian communist Lebrun in ‘On the Run’ is a record of something else, though the book answers a familiar question: ‘How, considering when he was born, had he become the man he was?’ Sympathetic interpretation is strikingly combined with sharp satire: we see the two characters Lebrun builds and uses for himself, ‘the man of the revolutionary cause’, and when it suits him, ‘the man of racial redemption’. Lebrun at the height of his prestige in old age:

… never spoke against a black racial regime. He presented Asian dispossession in Amin's Uganda and Nyerere's Tanzania as an aspect of class warfare. Guyana in South America he defended in a curious way: since the days of slavery, he said on one radio programme, the Caribbean could be considered as black people's territory.

This extremism is not just straight hypocrisy. As ageing celebrity he ‘never tried to stay in the places he visited’ (unlike the much younger West Indian revolutionary), returning to bases in Europe or Canada. He rootlessly toured Africa:

as a famous black man. He was welcomed by the leaders; his reputation began to feed on itself. He was said to be advising. He went to all kinds of tyrannies; to countries of murderous tribal wars; to collapsed economies. But when he came back he spoke on the television and radio as though he had been granted a vision of something more ideal, an Africa stripped of all that was incidental and passing …

In French West Africa he finds a ruler of state ‘who was ready to be his disciple, because the advice matched the ruler's own need’:

When the dictatorship collapsed and the desolate country was opened, no one thought of calling him to account. He was not associated with desolation. He was, rather, the man who had held fast both to ideas of revolution and African redemption; and had not been rewarded for his pains. In the mess of Africa and the Caribbean he was oddly pure.

The narrator visits the West African country that had been advised by Lebrun, and gives a Heart of Darkness atmosphere of forlorn street slogans with ‘INCREASE PRODUCTION’ and gangs of sinister criminal muggers, ‘the only local people I had seen who behaved like free people’. Yet this account is original; there is an understanding portrait of the country's West Indian Principal, and an ironical sympathy for Lebrun in the diagnosis of his criminally irresponsible position.

This may be a dark vision of anarchy, but Naipaul's view of Lebrun's life has a very human emphasis. The positives in the book further come out with the pathos and vividness of the account of Raleigh's last voyage, ‘A Parcel of Papers, a Roll of Tobacco, a Tortoise’, and the moral view behind the irony in ‘A New Man’, about an Asian Indian from Trinidad turned Venezuelan called Manuel Sorzano. The native Indian captive who voyages as a trophy with Raleigh to England and is returned to the Spanish concludes that for:

‘people like the Spaniards, and the English and the Dutch and the French, people who know how to go where they are going, I think for them the world is a safer place.’

The story shows from the dishonesties detected in Raleigh's past travel accounts, the confusions and gripping tragedy of his fatal last voyage, and the eerie, remote strangeness of what the English and Spanish experience (heightened by being seen through the eyes of the Indian hostage), that there are equal dangers for the colonising European. It is significant in the pattern of the book that Raleigh is going home to be executed, as later Miranda is going ‘home’ to be imprisoned.

Manuel Sorzano is a self-made man by unscrupulous means (looting treasure found on a building site) who is between cultures and identities:

A new land, a new name, a new identity, a new kind of family life, new languages even (Surinam Hindi would have been different from the Hindi he would have heard in Trinidad)—his life should have been full of stress, but he gave the impression of living as intuitively as he had always done, surviving, with no idea of being lost or in a void.

He has found his ‘El Dorado’ (which he wears as a gold necklace), yet his real treasure seems to be his blindly instinctive contact with the culture of his roots:

… living intuitively, he was possessed by what had remained of his ancestral culture. He couldn't stand back from it or assess it; he couldn't acquire external knowledge about it; and it would die with him. He would have no means of passing it on to his children. They had Spanish names and spoke only Venezuelan. These Sorzanos would be quite different; there would be no ambiguities about them; they would be the kind of Venezuelan stranger I had in the beginning taken their father for.

And he has gained a kind of ‘wisdom’ from his experiences, primitive as he is. This comes out in his verdict to his Venezuelan policeman son who (to the father's deep relief) after a turmoil of humiliation can't kill his unfaithful mistress:

‘I say, “I never had the kind of excitement in my life that you and your generation are looking for in yours. Yours is a modern way, and I must tell you I jealous you a little bit for it, for the freedom it give. But if you want this kind of freedom, you have to pay the price. Other people must have their excitement and freedom too. You can't tie them down. You can't start thinking of fair and unfair. Once you start looking for this excitement, you have to put away this idea of fair and unfair.”’

‘Fairness’ has to do with traditional ‘macho justice’, where the girl would be killed for infidelity because she broke the code. Naipaul gives a convincing and powerful insight into a crude man adapting to a different way of life in a raw modern state. A spicing of detached, wry irony avoids any suspicion of sentimentality.

Miranda's early-nineteenth-century sojourn in Trinidad before and after a failed invasion of Venezuela is brilliantly described. It is seen as a final watershed in a turbulent life of a self-made egotist who was driven by ambition, first to rise within the Spanish class system of his rulers, and then, when thwarted, in a frenzy of hatred of the Spanish, as a rebel in various identities—in Naipaul's words, ‘he had made himself over many times’. We also catch an epistolary glimpse of his wife's predicament in England. Miranda is beginning to look back at his past with some objectivity, and this makes him relate to other people like the English governor of Trinidad in a less dishonest way than the mere manipulative flattery of a crook. His past roles, treacheries and disguises are dropping away as he is getting nearer to his roots: in his words ‘I feel as though I am losing pieces of myself’. He is trapped in a rotten fabric and in a pattern of action that will lead to his destruction, and he now knows it, even if it can't be admitted. ‘The world shrinks around him’ while he waits. His final capture comes as a relief, and his understanding through failure of his attempt to ‘liberate’ Venezuela gives him self-knowledge that is ‘a kind of release’. His dealings with the Venezuelan lawyer, Andrés Level de Goda, who visits him in a Spanish prison and with the prison governor show him gathering real dignity and stature. In his cell awaiting transportation to Spain, he can diagnose himself frankly to Level:

‘Because of the way I have lived, always in other people's countries, I have always been able to hold two or more different ideas in my head at the same time. Two ideas about my country, two or three or four ideas about myself. I have paid a heavy price for this.’

One could add that other people (victims of Miranda's unbridled egotism) have paid a heavier price. But, far more than with Raleigh and even Lebrun, in this re-creation of history there is a gripping human insight into a flawed nature that emerges from the life of frenzied masquerades of a con-man on the run.

The book concludes with the ‘modern’ murder of Blair in a corrupt East African regime. He has been hired by the president to stamp out financial irregularities, and is butchered because of his investigations into gold and ivory smuggling. The Englishman Richard, who stays, with less excuse than Lebrun, a party-line Marxist, contrasts with the integrity of men like Blair, who die undiminished, or the academic De Groot, who ‘in Africa had no special cause; people looking for a man with a cause found him incomplete’. Here, besides the zest for description in the book, is the counterbalance to Naipaul's savage vision of chaos.

The English novel has provided classic panoramas of human effort set against existential chaos. Dr Oswald Spengler's ideas of cycles of history certainly reflected perspectives early in the twentieth century, before the collapse of Western colonialism. Conrad's Nostromo allegorically opens with human figures swallowed up by a South American landscape, and singles out the effort of individual will and human suffering. E. M. Forster's A Passage to India depicts Fielding's questioning of English rule (and of his own Humanism itself) in an India dwarfed by an inchoate mass of nature and humanity. Conrad and Forster would have comprehended Naipaul's value for understanding through experience and for an ultimate moral integrity whatever the scale of anarchy. Naipaul is as much preoccupied with the effects of colonialism as they are, but his concerns and angle of vision here are very different.

He remains characteristically the essential traveller, who at the same time warns of the dangers and abuses of the travelling way of life. So the third sequence in the book, ‘New Clothes’, sketches a vivid allegorical narrative about an intruder's exploitation of a South American country. Here Naipaul as narrator mediates between the experiences of some twentieth century Black Power extremist on the run and English Tudor contact with the land three hundred and fifty years earlier. There is some contrast with the rest of the volume, for this is a nostalgic glimpse of the rare freshness of a virgin territory, where people live as yet unspoiled in a closed community with no horizons. But while his travellers/observers like Miranda pick out the human landscape (as when he notices the Chinese imported labour in Trinidad), the view dwells on themselves and their destinies, or the destinies of other travellers such as Lebrun and Blair. Conrad in Nostromo not only gives the feel of societies as Naipaul brilliantly does, his vision can switch into them impersonally and leave the individual vision behind; he is far more than being just ‘the novelist of isolation’. Naipaul only works through limited narrative; he does not depict a Manuel Sorzano (for instance) and his son both in their relationship to each other and in a community, so creating an organic sense of the individual in society. For Conrad the individual is part of society, as Martin Decoud and Axel Heyst (in Victory) most painfully discover.

So Naipaul's bent lies not in a view of the individual in a society but in his reconstruction of the complexity and confusion of the traveller Miranda's situation (or the simpler Venezuelan Indian of ‘A New Man’), which has everything to do with colonialism, imposed identity and change. Conrad's equivalent of Miranda or Lebrun would only be the sophisticated barbarian Pedrito Montero, or the adventurer Sotillo, who merely passes from unscrupulous egotist to maniac, remaining a despicable image. Certainly, Naipaul makes us understand the case-history of Miranda, who is humanised by his partial coming to terms with himself and society; his acceptance of his Spanish prison marks a final dignity. But tellingly, the centre of Conrad's novel is elsewhere, in the collective suffering of society and the individuals who make it up, though it remains a work of savage satire.

At the conclusion of Reading and Writing Naipaul praises ‘the glorious cinema’ of the first fifty years of the last century, and controversially asserts that the realistic novel as practised in the nineteenth century (and taught in the twentieth!) can no longer deal with modern reality,¹⁷ though Mark Twain has shown that a novel (however repetitive) can be written about viewing chaos while travelling down the Mississippi on a raft. I have no trouble in reading A Way in the World as ‘realism’—given that this term encompasses the imaginative bearing some relation to the real world. And Naipaul's work, though he does not regard it as a novel, in a sense is just as much one as Nostromo or A Passage to India in that the author has a central controlling concern which unifies his ‘sequences’. However, one cannot avoid the judgement that it is a construct, being a vehicle for a developed talent which has become highly specialised. One appreciates that Naipaul's view has been fixed on the horizon, and that he is suffocated by place. His reality is that of an immensely knowledgeable man's who is passing through and looking back in the history of colonial change. While he has been searching for the gulf behind societies, he has been fascinated—obsessed even!—by people congenial to his considerable if sometimes rather supercilious gifts.¹⁸

Notes

1. For a quite different, Indian view of Naipaul, see Pankaj Mishra's ‘The House of Mr Naipaul’ in The New York Review of Books of January 20, 2000. This is a lucid review of Naipaul's Between Father and Son: Family Letters (London, 1999).

2. The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies—British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America, 1963.

3. The surrealistic comedy in The House of Mr Biswas is rather in the vein of the blackest parts of H. G. Wells's Mr Polly—as Wells's novel is also a Dickens-inspired imaginative fantasy loosely based on the author's own father, a poignant comparison could be made between novels of two different cultures. Naipaul's novel, of course, (unlike Wells's) gives a concrete sense of a family—his own family.

4. V. S. Naipaul's gifted younger brother, Shiva Naipaul (1945-85), also novelist and travel writer, took an Oxford degree in Chinese.

5. Naipaul hated Jane Austen's Emma on first reading it, finding it slick and full of gossip.

6. See the treatment of his first arrival in England in the autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987).

7. His friend Narayan also occupies him in An Area of Darkness (1964). Naipaul can at times be bluntly dismissive of those who are not cosmopolitan (see footnote 12). Naipaul much later in Reading and Writing (2000) explains the crucial difference between Narayan and himself as the following; he too could in dealing with experience ‘begin only with the externals of things’, but to do more, he ‘had to find other ways’, unlike Narayan, for Naipaul most revealingly puts it: ‘I had no idea or illusion of a complete world waiting for me somewhere’. The reader of Naipaul can see how these ‘other ways’ (which had included a deepening understanding of his father) would eventually lead to the art of A Way in the World.

8. Reading and Writing, New York, 2000, p. 18.

9. Naipaul seems to confuse the undoubted commercialisation of the current novel and the glibness of much academic teaching of it with an essential limitation of form and of adaptability to modern conditions. Perhaps another factor is his personal sense of having exhausted material as a novelist.

10. Between Father and Son: Family Letters by V. S. Naipaul, ed. Gillon R. Aitken, London, 1999.

11. As in Among the Believers (1981), a study of Islam.

12. And see an interview in At Random Magazine (June 1998) with Tarun J. Tejpal where Naipaul intemperately pronounces on other writers (including T. S. Eliot):

    ‘What's there in Joyce for me? A blind man living in Trieste. And talking about Dublin. There's nothing in it for me, it's not universal. And a man of so little, so little imagination, able to record life around him in such a petty way, but depending on an ancient narrative. No, no, no.’

13. See Naipaul's Finding the Centre (1984) for a description of the writer's struggle with his relation to his family and background.

14. That in A Bend in the River, the Belgian historian Raymond is engaged by The Big Man to write propaganda, is another sign of the influence on Naipaul of Winston Smith's experiences.

15. While he is of a different generation, from Oxford and not Cambridge, and a Graham Greene protégé, the name has E. M. Forster suggestions (Forster ＋ his homosexual novel Maurice).

16. Compare this insight with Naipaul's conclusion in Reading and Writing (in ‘The Writer and India 2’) about Narayan's India:

    Narayan's world is not, after all, as rooted and complete as it appears. His small people dream simply of what they think has gone before, but they are without personal ancestry; there is a great blank in their past.

17. The late twentieth century, surfeited with news, culturally far more confused, threatening again to be as full of tribal or folk movement as during the centuries of the Roman Empire, needs another kind of interpretation.

18. In a filmed interview shown on B.B.C.'s Open University, Naipaul has explained that he could quickly tell whether people he interviewed would be of use to him in his travel books or not.