Book Review 090 / A Bend in the River by VS Naipul

A BEND IN THE RIVER

By V. S. Naipaul

A Dark Vision

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 90 / A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)

By IRVING HOWE
May 13, 1979

or sheer abundance of talent there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V. S. Naipaul. Whatever we may want in a novelist is to be found in his books: an almost Conradian gift for tensing a story, a serious involvement with human issues, a supple English prose, a hard-edged wit, a personal vision of things. Best of all, he is a novelist unafraid of using his brains--he would surely jeer at the common American notion that the exercise of mind saps a writer's vital juices. His novels are packed with thought, not as lumps of abstraction but as one fictional element among others, fluid in the stream of narrative.

Graham Green / 'The Battle of Britain was won on Benzedrine'

Graham Greene
Ilustration by T.A.

Graham Greene: 'The Battle of Britain was won on Benzedrine'

VS Naipaul

11 April 2016

•  

For this 1968 profile from the Telegraph archive, republished to mark the 25th anniversary of Graham Greene's death on April 4, the novelist VS Naipaul spent two days in the south of France with Greene, who said some astonishing things. 

Graham Greene has been living in France for two years. The French tax authorities are less harsh on the writer; the franc is free. Travel is easier, and travel is important to Mr Greene who, at 63, still likes to feel, as he says, that he is living on a frontier.

He has always been a political writer, interested in the larger movement of events. Before the war the frontiers were European. Now these lines of anxiety run everywhere. When I met Mr Greene he was off in a few days to Sierra Leone; and he was planning an Easter visit to the West Indies to St Kitts and Anguilla. He is an expatriate, but he feels very English. And though there are moments when he regrets the passing of the Victorian peace, he wishes, like the narrator of The Comedians, his last novel, to remain committed to the whole world.

VS Naipaul / A sad pastoral

VS Naipaul

A sad pastoral

The Enigma of Arrival by VS Naipaul

320 pp, Penguin, £7.99

Salman Rushdie

Friday 13 March 1987

A few years ago, VS Naipaul said that he still thought of himself as a comic writer, and that his highest ambition was to write a comedy to equal his magnificent 1961 novel, A House for Mr Biswas. To read this was to feel heartened - if the author could find a way of uniting the warmth and energy of the early work that culminated in Biswas with the magisterial technical control of his later writing, we might, might we not, be in for something rather special?

But there were doubts. The dark clouds that seemed to have gathered over Naipaul's inner world would not, one feared, be easily dispelled; his affection for the human race appeared, to me at any rate, to have diminished, and the comedy of Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur, the suffrage of Elvira and Biswas, cutting and unsentimental as those books were, had been essentially affectionate. The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul's first novel in eight years, suggests that the clouds have not lifted, but deepened. The book lacks the bitter taste of some of his recent writing, but it is one of the saddest books I have read in a long while, its tone one of unbroken melancholy.

'This melancholy penetrated my mind while I slept,' says the narrator whom it is impossible not to see as the author, 'and then, when I awakened... I was so poisoned by it... that it took the best part of the day to shake it off. '

It's a strange book, more meditation than novel, autobiographical in the sense that if offers a portrait of the intellectual landsape of one who has long elevated 'the life of the mind' above all other forms of life. Its subject is the narrator's consciousness, its reformation by the act of migration, of 'arrival', and its gradual turning towards James's 'distinguished thing,' death.

There are other characters here but they are observed from a distance, the main events in their lives - an elopement, a sacking, a death - taking place off-stage. As a result of this emptying, the writer becomes the subject; the storyteller becomes the tale.

Interestingly, and unlike most of his fellow migrants, Naipaul has chosen to inhabit a pastoral England, an England of manor and stream. The book's first segment deals with what he calls his 'second childhood' in this piece of Wiltshire. The notion of migration as a form of rebirth is one whose truth many migrants will recognise.

Instantly recognisable, too, and often very moving, is the sense of a writer feeling obliged to bring his new world into being by an act of pure will, the sense that if the world is not described into existence in the most minute detail, then it won't be there. The immigrant must invent the earth beneath his feet.

So Naipaul describes: this lane, this cottage, this gardener, this view of Stonehenge, this tiny patch of the planet in which his narrator must learn, once more, to see. It is a kind of extreme minimalism, but it becomes almost hypnotic. And slowly the picture is built, figures arrive in the landscape, a new world is won.

Through the story - well, the account - of the farm labourer Jack and his garden, we are shown how the narrator's view of this rustic England changes. At first idyllic - 'Of literature and antiquity and the landscape Jack and his garden... seemed emanations' - it develops along more realistic lines. Jack's health fails, his garden decays, he dies, the new occupants of his cottage concrete over his garden. The idea of timelessness, of Jack as being 'solid, rooted in his earth', turns out to be false. Change and decay in all around I see.

So the new world begins to be seen for what it is, but at what a price! It's as if Naipaul had expended so much of his energy on the effort of creating and comprehending his piece of Wiltshire that he had no strength left with which to make the characters breathe and move.

They manage only tiny mutters of activity; even the story of Brenda, the country wife who expected too much from her beauty, and Les, the husband who murdered her after she returned, tail between her legs, from her failed attempt at an affair with another man, is told in an oddly enervated, inconsequential manner.

The narrator speaks often of his spirit being broken, of illness, of exhaustion. He once wanted to write a story based on Chirico's painting The Enigma of Arrival, he says, and then, in less than a page, gives us a summary of this untold tale. It is quite brilliant, a traveller's tale set in the classical world of the surrealist painting, utterly unlike anything Naipaul has ever written.

The painting shows a port, a sail, a tower, two figures. Naipaul makes one of the figures a traveller who arrives at a 'dangerous classical city'. 'Gradually... his feeling of adventure would give way to panic. I imagined some religious ritual in which, led on by kindly people, he would unwittingly take part and find himself the intended victim. At the moment of crisis he would come upon a door, open it, and find himself back on the quayside of arrival... only one thing is missing now... The antique ship has gone. The traveller has lived out his life. '

The book we have is at once more honest and direct, and less vibrant and engaging, than the first-imagined fantasy, and especially in the drawn-out second half of the novel, one frequently wishes that Naipaul had been able to write the discarded tale. Exhaustion again; when the strength for fiction fails the writer, what remains is autobiography.

After an interesting, and courageous, account of his formation as a writer, Naipaul returns to his Wiltshire microcosm, and it turns out that his narrator's exhaustion and turning-towards-death is mirrored in his tiny world. A version of England is dying, too, the manor no longer as economically powerful as it was, its owner sunbathing plump-thighed amid the decay.

Just about all the book's personages are in some way in thrall to the manor - a second gardener, Pitton, the estate manager Phillips and his wife, a driver, a failed writer, even the narrator himself - and they, too, are going down with the ship. Death and failure stalk them all.

All this is evoked in delicate, precise prose of the highest quality, but it is bloodless prose. The idea that the British have lost their way because of 'an absence of authority, an organisation in decay', that the fall of the manor encourages ordinary folk 'to hasten decay, to loot, to reduce to junk', is an unlikable, untenable one. But if only the book occasionally sparked into some sort of life. As it stands, the portrait of exhaustion becomes, eventually, just exhausting.

Why such utter weariness? We are told of a dream of an exploding head, of ill health, of family tragedy. There may be more to it. I think it was Borges who said that in a riddle to which the answer is knife, the only word that cannot be employed is knife.

There is one word I can find nowhere in the text of The Enigma of Arrival. That word is 'love', and a life without love, or one in which love has been buried so deep that it can't come out, is very much what this book is about and what makes it so very, very sad.

THE GUARDIAN

Paul Theroux / Guerrillas

VS Naipaul

Guerrillas

By PAUL THEROUX

November 16, 1975

It is hard for the reviewer of a wonderful author to keep the obituarist's assured hyperbole in check, but let me say that if the silting-up of the Thames coincided with a freak monsoon, causing massive flooding in all parts of South London, the first book I would rescue from my library would be "A House for Mr. Biswas," by V. S. Naipaul. Apart from anything else, it would be immensely helpful when the water subsided, since it is one of the century's best fictional examples of a householder struggling against unfriendly conditions in a village--"a place that was nowhere, a dot on the map of the island, which was a dot on the map of the world."

The island is Trinidad, where Naipaul was born in 1932, and he has written about it with insight and compassion in many of his thirteen books. He has written of other places as well--India in "An Area of Darkness," Africa in "In a Free State," London in "Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion" and the oddly-lit world of exile in "The Mimic Men." His history, "The Loss of El Dorado," is the envy of most historians who specialize in the origins of New World imperialism and slavery; his essays in "The Overcrowded Barracoon" are masterpieces of vivid compression, good sense and wide reference (cricket, Mailer, London, Columbus, Kipling, colonialism). In all of Naipaul's work it is possible to see how a preoccupation with truth, an exactitude of vision, cannot but be prophetic.

"A House for Mr. Biswas" is a vast Dickensian novel, "The Mystic Masseur" is slighter and sunnier; but whether Naipaul is writing fiction or non-fiction his perceptions are precise, and in both his concerns have remained constant: creation, fantasy, marriage, statelessness and travel, our use of the past and the casualties of freedom. He has spoken of himself as being without a past, without ancestors, a country or a tradition. He is a Brahmin who has used his sacred thread to tie his luggage; and how well he understands other people's countries! Read "An Area of Darkness" and you understand both the complexity of India in its present political extreme and the strange fate of Indians in Trinidad; "Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion" is a sad comedy of middle-class English life and the creative impulse; and reading his new novel, "Guerrillas," I was reminded of something the narrator of "The Mimic Men" says: "Hate oppression; fear the oppressed."

"The violence [in modern writing] some of us are resisting," Naipaul once observed, "is the violence which is clinical and documentary in intention and makes no statement beyond that of bodily pain and degradation. It is like the obscene photograph. It deals anonymously with anonymous flesh, quickened only by pleasure or pain; and this anonymity is a denial of art." "Guerrillas" is a violent book in which little violence is explicit; and it is the opposite of anonymous. It may surprise the casual readers of Naipaul's work, those who regret the absence of calypso in his West Indian books. And yet in a metaphorical sense it takes place on the same island he has described in many of his novels, where Mr. Biswas was a journalist, Picton was a governor, Ganesh was a pundit, and Ralph Singh was a politician--indeed, the island that once seemed "a dot on the map of the world itself, immense and troubled and returning to its darker origins, a slave-society in which in every barracoon is a mimicking enactment of rebellion, the oppressed as dangerous and evil-smelling as their oppressors. It is a novel, not of revolt, but of the play-acting that is frequently called revolt, that queer situation of scabrous glamour which Naipaul sees as a throw-back to the days of slavery, half-remembered even now in the angry grizzling of people like Jimmy Ahmed, the lost soul of the present novel.

"Guerrillas" is one of Naipaul's most complex books; it is certainly his most suspenseful, a series of shocks, like a shroud slowly unwound from a bloody corpse, showing the damaged--and familiar--face last. The island now is infertile, crowded, reeking with gas fumes and the dust from the bauxite plant. The particularities of irritation are everywhere, for this is the Third World with her disordered armies and supine population, and --with a vengeance--her camp followers. Jimmy, the fifties' pimp and sixties' black power leader, is the seventies' guerrilla; Roche, the jaded white liberal, resembles in his wronged mood a slave-owner--he is a kind of benign puppeteer; and Jane, who uses the lingo of sympathy easily ("words that she might shed at any time, as easily as she had picked them up, and forget that she had ever spoken them")--Naipaul describes her best:

"She was without memory. . .She was without consistency or even without coherence. She knew only what she was and what she had been born to; to this knowledge she was tethered; it was her stability, enabling her to adventure in security. Adventuring, she was indifferent, perhaps blind, to the contradiction between what she said and what she was so secure of being; and this indifference or blindness, this absence of the sense of the absurd, was part of her unassailability."

The condition Naipaul is describing here is as American as apple pie, and though Jane is English she epitomizes our own failure to understand just how empty and foolish someone like Patty Hearst is, and why it is always fatal to misread the intentions of adventurers and their victims. Jane is of the West; "Guerrillas" is very much of the present, and the convulsion to which Naipaul is giving artistic expression could not be more horrifyingly close. Roche, who was once in a South African prison on a political charge, works for a firm of West Indian traders (formerly slave traders, now respectable). He is concerned with helping dispossessed blacks on this island find their feet, though in fact he is exercising a kind of control over them. Jimmy is one of his charges, and Jimmy's commune--a ramshackle affair--is subsidized by Roche's company.

It is at this point that Jane arrives on the island, and it is she who causes the situation to worsen: she is adventuring, but she carries anxiety to the place and, without ever guessing it, intensifies the paranoia Jimmy has begun to feel. She is habituated to using people for her own drama, but in a series of reversals she herself is used, until at last she becomes a ritual sacrifice; in this way, Jimmy placates his reptilian catamite, Bryant. And in the end, Roche, whom Jimmy has always jokingly called "Massa," fulfills his role. The last word in the book is literal, not ironic: "Massa"--Jimmy knows what he is saying.

Most men are captive, and therefore brutal and small, but there are survivors. There is an aspect of life on the island that goes slumbering on, and an ambitious politician, a tycoon, a media-man and a gospel singer appear as if to show that this tiny world contains other worlds; in this fury there is solitude and even contentment--the Sunday lunch party in the tropics, the prayer meeting on the beach, the bathers and tourists.

It is amazing that in such a closely-plotted book there is room for this, but the people themselves are even more remarkable. This is a novel without a villain, and there is not a character for whom the reader does not at some point feel deep sympathy and keen understanding, no matter how villainous or futile he may seem. "Guerrillas" is a brilliant novel in every way, and it shimmers with artistic certainty. It is scarifying in the opposite way from a nightmare. One can shrug at fantasy, but "Guerillas"--in a phrase Naipaul himself once used--is, like the finest novels, "indistinguishable from truth."

Paul Theroux's most recent books are "The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia" and "The Black House," a novel.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

VS Naipul

V.S. Naipaul Courted Controversy at Every Step, But His Voice Was Never Ignored

His voice, even though bleak, hollow and ill-informed at times, was his own. In an age where originality seemed to have disappeared, his writing came as a powerful stroke of a master.

Manan Kapoor

12 August 2018

In London, miles away from his house in the quaint village of Wiltshire where he lived with his wife Lady Nadira Naipaul and his cat Augustus, Sir V.S. Naipaul died aged 85. Naipaul was indisputably a global voice. The Nobel laureate cast his shadow on all things that were relevant in the world in which he lived – the ironies of exile, the various beliefs and portraits of the post-colonial worlds. In 2001, the Swedish Academy described Naipaul as “a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice”. It was true. He was a circumnavigator whose unique voice captivated the world for almost half a century.

There is something magical about Naipaul’s writing, a swan-like flair, a sense of originality and character. But his works have always left a bittersweet impression in the reader’s minds. He not only had a wide readership, but also a plethora of critics who never spared him. Today, he is remembered as a prolific writer whose purpose in life was to only write, and a fierce personality who would sometimes walk out on public appearances and generate controversies throughout the world with his remarks.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in colonial Trinidad in 1932, but it would never become his home. His background, as he suggested, was “exceedingly simple” yet “exceedingly confused”. In the late 1800s, his grandparents, who had roots in India, had ended up in the Caribbean as indentured labourers. But his father, Seepersad Naipaul, went on to become the first Indo-Trinidadian reporter for the Trinidad Guardian. In a similar fashion, Vidya, or as his father called him, ‘Vido’, was sent to the Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain and upon graduation, he won the Trinidad Government Scholarship. Naipaul chose the best – Oxford.

Once he was there, the young Vido found himself lost. He’d come to England to become a writer and once he was there, he didn’t know what to write about. Later, he would reflect on his early days, and say, “It is mysterious, for instance, that the ambition should have come first – the wish to be a writer, to have that distinction, that fame – and that this ambition should have come long before I could think of anything to write about.” It was his father, a writer himself who published a book called The Adventures of Gurudeva, who imbued the spirit of writing in his son. Naipaul recalls in an interview that it was his father who started it, and read to him from Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery.

It was his third book, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), that marked Naipaul’s rise as one of the world’s finest literary voices. The protagonist of the book, Mohun Biswas, was loosely based on Naipaul’s father. And like all the non-fiction books that would follow, this book too had all the elements that Naipaul surrounded himself with for most of his life – identity, religion, life in the Third World, home and the absence of a home.

All that followed was a mutilation of all these themes, expressed through multiple voices and forms. He began writing non-fiction in 1960s, and published his book The Middle Passage in 1962. In the book, he explored colonialism, slavery, language, the post colonial identity and inter-racial tensions in a year-long trip through five societies – Trinidad, British Guiana, Suriname, Martinique and Jamaica. Soon, he would publish books that are still widely read today, including A Bend in the River (1979), An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Million Mutinies (1990) and A Turn in the South(1989).

His rise to fame was fast. He received the Man Booker Prize for In a Free State (1971). In 1989, he was knighted. When in 2001 the Swedish Academy called, the phone was picked up by his wife. Naipaul never answered the phone. The caller informed her that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Naipaul couldn’t be bothered. He was in his room, writing. By the end of the 20th century, Sir Vidia had already become a recognised voice in world literature. But in all his major publications, Naipaul took upon himself the duty to address the condition of the post-colonial subjects. But he received heavy criticism wherever he went with his mighty pen.

Chinua Achebe called him “a new purveyor of the old comforting myths” of the white West. The celebrated poet, Derek Walcott, wrote in a poem “I see these islands and I feel to bawl, / ‘area of darkness’ with V.S. Nightfall”. And it didn’t end there. In India, Girish Karnad called him out at a talk, and wrote, “Mr. Naipaul has written three books on India. If you read them, you find that not even one of them contains any reference to music. He has gone through the whole of India without responding to Indian music. I think that only means that he is tone deaf.” His writing had started to stir the literary world.

It was his obsession with Islam that led him to what Edward Said called the ‘intellectual catastrophe of the first order’. In his two books, Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998), Naipaul explored the non-Arab Islamic world. In both books, Naipaul traveled to four nations – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, first in 1979, and then in 1995, to study the ‘converted’ people and their attempts to establish a modern Islamic state. After Among the Believers received criticism, in the prologue to Beyond Belief, he wrote “I’m a manager of narratives” and that in the book ‘(the) people of the country come to the front’.

Naipaul believed that Islam has had a calamitous effect on converted people, and that it has destroyed their past and history. But he is often deemed an elitist, a man of Western thought who didn’t fully understand the cultures of his subjects. Naipaul only observed his subjects from a distance and often lacked self-awareness. In reality, he never touched his subjects with his bare hands, only with a stick, as if he was trying to poke them to generate a reaction which he surprisingly did. James A. Michener wrote, “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home,” and it stands true for Naipaul.

V.S. Naipaul. Credit: Facebook

While both the books were profound explorations of the histories of the ‘converted’ Islamic nations, they did little to understand the people of those nations, and to be honest, the people were never in front. Eqbal Ahmad, the Pakistani writer and academic, while discussing Naipaul’s book Beyond Belief, said, “This is not writing. He should stop writing. He should be selling sausages.” His condescending approach implied that the natives neither had anything to say, nor the right to speak. Naipaul’s writings about the Muslim world and Islam became a matter of great controversy as well as an increasing influence in the West. In the ‘Third World’, he was heavily criticised, denounced and mocked. But one thing was certain – his voice was never ignored.

He was at the heart of each controversy. He once stated that “Africans need to be kicked, that’s the only thing they understand”. On another occasion, in an interview in 2011, when he was asked if he considers any female writer equal to him, he responded by saying, “I don’t think so…I couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world.” He went on to say, “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me,” and that this is because of a woman’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world… And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.”

In 2004, Naipaul was invited to the BJP’s office at Ashoka Road, where he remarked that the demolition of the Babri Masjid was ‘a balancing act’. He believed that the monuments of the Mughals are ‘a personal plunder’ and that India is ‘a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered’. According to Naipaul “the Taj is so wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people.” All of these remarks have generated resentment towards him in the past. Not only from readers, but also from eminent writers. Naipaul, on the other hand, in all arrogance believed that if a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.

But his voice, even though bleak, hollow and ill-informed at times, was his own. In an age where originality seemed to have disappeared, his writing came as a powerful stroke of a master. Even though not many agreed with him, there is one thing no one refutes. He was always sharp, amusing, enthralling and entertaining, if not new or revitalising.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said, “I am the sum of my books”, and he was. Up until his death, Naipaul was a charismatic yet controversial writer, always dressed in corduroy trousers and tweed jackets, he held his own world in his hands. Most fail the tests that he easily aced. For all the pessimism that he stored in himself, he was a universalist and his writing declared that there was still hope, that home can always be found, and must be found.

Manan Kapoor is a writer and poet based out of New Delhi. He is author of The Lamentations of the Sombre Sky and is currently working on a non-fiction title.

THE WIRE

VS Naipul

Naipaul And His Three Women

'I knew Pat was dying and Margaret was finished.... It was not that I was trying to displace a dying woman and an old floozy': Nadira

PATRICK FRENCH
31 MARCH 2008

As he approached the age of retirement, V.S. Naipaul felt compelled to go on writing. By early 1995, unable to find the spark for a work of fiction, Vidia decided to loop back on himself once more and write a reprise of Among the Believers, his prescient early study of Islamic extremism. In a new global political climate, he would return to Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan to look at the future of Islamist ideology through the fate of the places and personalities he had encountered in 1979. Once again, he would make a forceful rejection of the late 20th century academic convention that all cultures, peoples and belief systems are different but equal. On July 25, 1995, Vidia flew out of Heathrow airport to Jakarta. As on his previous trips, he asked other people to aid him, and in most cases they fell over themselves to do so. His Anglo-Argentine mistress of 23 years' standing, Margaret Gooding, jumped on an aeroplane and travelled loyally with him through Indonesia, being permitted to collect and file useful press cuttings. Publishers' staff in London and New York provided contacts and helpers. Ian Buruma recommended the journalist Ahmed Rashid in Pakistan, who produced a string of names and invited Vidia to stay at his house in Lahore. The editor of the New York Review of Books Bob Silvers found regional experts and their telephone numbers. The publisher Harry Evans sent a gigantic list of possibly interesting people. The journalist Rahul Singh located politicians in Jakarta. Once Vidia arrived in the relevant country, diplomats would arrange dinners and foreign correspondents would open their contacts books to him. When he left for Indonesia, he knew his wife Pat was seriously ill with a recurrence of breast cancer. A month earlier, in a chilling letter to his accountant, Vidia had written: "Pat's personal papers (an important element of the archive) will be shipped on her death." A fortnight after he left England she was admitted to Chalybeate Hospital, and he sent her a fax with "tremendous and enduring love". After 40 years, Vidia was again feeling the sort of intense emotion he had felt during their early courtship. He wrote to Pat: "Very grieved to hear about so many things. Please let me know what you think I can do. With v. great love and gratitude for all that you are. V." And Pat, being Pat, suggested there was nothing her husband should do except continue with his work. So he travelled to Bandung, telling her that the material was shaping up. "I was visibly moved by the Fax," wrote Pat, who had to rest for long stretches each morning and evening. "I read it like lightning. It answered every need. You asked what you could do and that was it."

Man Booker Prize 1971 / In a Free State by VS Naipul

MAN BOOKER PRIZE 1971

Booker club: In a Free State

Looking back at the Booker: VS Naipaul

VS Naipaul deserves plenty of laurels, but whether In a Free State should be the prizewinner is harder to say

Sam Jordison

Friday 21 December 2007

The debates raging this year over the appointment of celebrities to prize committees and their stewardship by oleaginous former MPs seem all the more downmarket when considering who was on the 1971 Booker panel: John Fowles, Saul Bellow, Lady Antonia Fraser and Philip Toynbee with the respected critic John Gross as chair.

Perhaps, however, the experience of 1971 was enough to make the prize organisers think twice about including so many free-thinking intellectual heavyweights again. While Gross would cheerily describe the books he had to read as “rather a good lot”, Fowles, never one to mince his words said (probably more accurately): “Some of the publishers’ entries were insults to the judges and the others on their lists.” Bellow meanwhile declared that: “Five per cent were interesting,” and added: “For the rest it was like meeting virgins, who are neither wise nor foolish, but just bald.”

Most egregiously of all, and thus proving that the contemporary debate about whether the prize should go to the writer or the book (pace Ian McEwan and Amsterdam), Bellow also let slip that the prize had gone to: “the best writer, but not the best book.” He did so a full month before the prize was due to be officially announced, and, in fact, a week before the shortlist was even published.

Joking aside ... VS Naipaul. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

I’ve been unable to discover which book Bellow actually thought better than In A Free State, but that’s by-the-by. Perhaps the most striking thing about the statement is that everybody seems to have assumed from it that VS Naipaul was going to win, even though other contenders included Doris Lessing and Elizabeth Taylor.

The Trinidadian titan’s status in 1971 was especially high, before all those memoirs complaining about his all-elbows personality and after a remarkable decade of writing beginning with A House For Mr Biswas. This breakthrough comic masterpiece, still regarded as one of his best, had been produced at a price, however. The strain of writing it left him, he said, “a changed man”. He also noted sadly: “One has been damaged.”

That damage appears most starkly in his Booker winner. The good humour of his earlier books has been replaced by something harder and sharper, full of loathing and disgust. Something cruel even, although made all the sadder by Naipaul’s equally strong compassion.

Even in those early days a spot of minor controversy flared up because of the book’s being a story suite rather than one whole novel. Two short stories, One Out of Many and Tell Me Who to Kill, and the novella In A Free State are book-ended by two fragments of travel journal The Tramp At Piraeus and The Circus At Luxor. All concern different people and are in fact, set in very different places and even climates. All five are united, however, as studies of characters who are not in their native countries, of alienation, of racial tension and of sudden unpredictable shifts in power.

The Tramp At Piraeus is the literary equivalent of a maestro flexing his fingers, testing his theme with a few chords and melody lines before plunging into the main piece. It’s a profoundly uncomfortable description of the bullying of a mentally ill English tramp by two Libyans and a German on a ship sailing from Greece. One of the most exquisitely painful short pieces I have read for a long time, tense and tragic, with no word out of place and no word superfluous, it actually promises more than the rest of the book can deliver.

The two short stories One Out Of Many and Tell Me Who To Kill are impressive enough, but not so brilliantly realised. It’s possible for instance to detect inconsistencies of voice in Naipaul’s supposedly barely literate, but actually very learned sounding, protagonist in Tell Me Who To Kill. The final squib is equally discomfiting, but featuring as it does some stereotypically chic and heartless Italians and indistinguishable Chinese characters, it leaves something of a sour aftertaste.

The main chunk of the book, In A Free State, meanwhile, is a flawed masterpiece.

It’s easy to see why contemporary reviewers described this novella as a “Conradian tour de force”. Obsessed with savagery, cruelty, the human facility for violent sadism and unleashing horror, this story of a long drive to a place where there’s “nothing to do” undertaken by two British acquaintances in a former African colony, is a worthy heir to Heart Of Darkness.

Interestingly, although the writer has recently suggested he has no literary influences, at the time of writing he was happy to acknowledge a debt to Ibsen. There’s definitely something of the Scandinavian playwright in the intensity of the dialogue that the two travelling companions engage in, not to mention the air of doom that hangs over the whole.

There’s also plenty that is Naipaul’s own, however. He inhabits the minds of his protagonists totally and never flinches at unveiling their darker parts of their characters - the way they think “Africans” “stink”, their own self-hatred, their lack of purpose, the depths to which they will sink in order to survive. There are some superb set pieces (particularly an uncomfortable night in a hotel run by a colonel who bullies and rages at his native staff, but knows they will soon kill him). As the drive becomes a race against time and impending civil war, the tension is ratcheted up with accomplished skill.

On top of all that, of course, there is the exquisite prose.

It seems churlish then to complain about such a fine piece of writing. But I did have some grumbles. In contrast to his ability to lay bare the psychology of racism, Naipaul’s depiction of a homosexual is clumsy. Bobby, the male half of the dysfunctional lead duo, is something of a gay caricature. He’s arrogant, highly-strung, masochistic, full of “cunt” hatred and pathetically weak and needy when it comes to his “adventures” with local men. The portrayals of these “natives” meanwhile, may well be deliberately wafer-thin, presumably in order to reflect the way the Europeans view them, but they remain correspondingly unsatisfying. Finally, there’s an intangible quality missing that makes it hard to warm to this book, in spite of its dazzling prose. As Naipaul’s sometime editor Diana Athill said of the bulk of his later works, “they impress, but they do not charm.”

There’s no doubt, pace Bellow, that Naipaul deserves a Booker. Whether this is the right work for the award, however, is another question...

THE GUARDIAN

Man Booker Prize

1969 Something to Answer For by PH Newby
1970 The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens
1971 In a Free State by VS Naipul
1972 G by John Berger
1973 The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell

1978 The sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

1979 Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

1980 Rites of Passage by William Golding

1987 Moon Tiger by Penelope Livery

1988 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

1992 The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

1996 Last Orders by Graham Swift

The 100 best novels / No 90 / A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 90

 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)

VS Naipaul’s hellish vision of an African nation’s path to independence saw him accused of racism, but remains his masterpiece

Robert McCrum

Monday 8 June 2015 05.45 BST

“A Bend in the River,” VS Naipaul has written, with that hint of creative inscrutability he cherishes, “remains mysterious.” At the same time, however, it is perhaps the novel that most nearly touches the author’s inner concerns. Salim, who comes from the east coast of Africa, from a long-established Indian trading family, uproots himself to the heart of an unnamed African country as a merchant and sets up shop in an unnamed town at this “bend in the river”. Salim, like Naipaul himself, is under no illusions about his move and declares, in a celebrated opening line: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

Is this the Congo? Naipaul says so, conceding “an echo” of a journey he made to Kinshasa in 1975. His brilliantly reimagined fictional landscape conjures a hellish vision of the developing world’s endemic dislocation. The town in which Salim, “a man without a side”, sets up shop, formerly Arab, then colonial, becomes a microcosm of a society moving towards independence: a place of chaotic and violent change; tribal warfare, ignorance, poverty and human degradation. Salim’s story is punctuated by irruptions of violent death, a tormented love affair and his own complex, terror-struck response to the emergence of “the Big Man”, an archetypal African dictator.

Naipaul, who is of Indian ancestry like Salim, is drawn to this visceral and dangerous scene while being at the same time disdainful of its crudeness and savagery. Salim’s story articulates a vision of disorder and decline in a moment of post-imperial upheaval that has made Naipaul vulnerable to accusations of having reactionary artistic politics.

When, at the end, the character Ferdinand urges Salim to flee for his life, he does so in language that seems to open a window on to Naipaul’s inner vision: “We’re all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning… It’s a nightmare – nowhere is safe now.” Naipaul’s acid contempt for the independence struggle has inspired as much hostile criticism as Conrad for Heart of Darkness (No 32 in this series). Indeed, Naipaul towers next to Conrad, whose work surely inspired this novel. In his prime, Naipaul was the greatest living writer of English prose and this (in my judgment, slightly ahead of Guerrillas and The Enigma of Arrival) is his masterpiece.

A note on the text

A Bend in the River is set in central Africa, yet Naipaul claims he “knew very little about this part of the world when I settled down to write… I had travelled widely and it might have been said that there was nothing clear in my head.”

Nevertheless, the novel seems to have been written fast, from July 1977 to August 1978, with some of it, notably the “easy and complete fabrication” of the character Ferdinand, coming to Naipaul in a dream. He has added subsequently that his dream life has never been as fruitful since.

At first, Naipaul’s literary agent (soon to be fired) judged the book too “cerebral” and, as the author sourly notes, “a year’s work fetched only $25,000”. However, A Bend in the River, published by Knopf in New York in May 1979, immediately won powerful support from reviewers. The critic Elizabeth Hardwick praised “a haunting creation, rich with incident and human bafflement, played out in an immense detail of landscape rendered with poignant brilliance”.

John Updike (No 88 in this series) wrote: “Always a master of fictional landscape, Naipaul here shows, in his variety of human examples and in his search for underlying social causes, a Tolstoyan spirit.” This was especially generous. Updike had just published his own “African novel”, The Coup, and was coming under fire for straying into a landscape he could not understand.

Not everyone was so enchanted. Edward Said attacked a novel that, he declared, continued a long tradition of “hostility to Islam, to the Arabs”. A Bend in The Riverwas shortlisted for the 1979 Booker prize but, perhaps because Naipaul had already won (in 1971) with In a Free State, he was passed over.

Politics has always hovered mutinously off stage in response to Naipaul’s work. When I interviewed him in 2008, he seemed resigned to the adversity and probably indifferent to it. He was already a Nobel laureate, probably the best riposte to the critics.

Three more from VS Naipaul

A House for Mister Biswas (1961); Guerrillas (1975); The Enigma of Arrival (1987).

THE GUARDIAN

000 The 100 best novels: an introduction by Robert McCrum

001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)

003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson  (1748)

005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding  (1749)

006 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)

010 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli  (1845)

012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  

015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

018 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)

020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

022 The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome  (1889)

026  The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

027  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

028  New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)

034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)

038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) 

039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)

041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

054 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

055 As I Lay Dying  by William Faulkner  (1930)

056 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

057 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

058 Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)

059 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

060 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)

061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
064 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
065 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
066 Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
067 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
068 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
069 The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)

070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell  (1949)

071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene  (1951) 

072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)

078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

079 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)

080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) 

082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964) 

084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966) 

086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

087 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)

088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)

089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979) 

091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

092 Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981)

093  Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis (1984)

094 An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)

095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
096 Breathing Lesson by Anne Tyler (1988)
097 Amongst Women by John McGahem (1990)
098 Underwold by Don DeLillo (1997)
099 Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999)

100 True Story of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2000)