Shiva Naipaul died unexpectedly in the summer of 1985, six months after his 40th birthday. In his decade and a half on Grub Street, he published three novels, a brace of polemical travelogues and the scintillating miscellany of stories and occasional pieces collected in Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (1984). An Unfinished Journey, an account of a Sri Lankan trip, whose 80th page he had reached when he suffered the heart attack that killed him, was issued posthumously in 1986. He was much loved (see the portrait by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in Absent Friends, 1989), much admired, much abused and — almost inevitably, given some of the things he wrote about — much misunderstood. The memorial essay prize instituted in his name by The Spectator after his death has been revived this year.
Like his older brother Vidia, Shiva could be an intimidating presence, both on the page and off it. A year before his death a producer at the fledgling Channel 4 — a rather more highbrow concern in those days — commissioned a piece from him entitled The Illusion of the Third World. The essay, later published in this magazine, was delivered without props, direct to a camera that, thanks to some technical quirk, grew nearer and nearer as the programme unwound. By the close, all that remained was Naipaul’s face, flushed, hectic and accusing, in grotesquely exaggerated close-up, as he declared that in the name of the Third World we ‘maddened ourselves with untruth’.
The Illusion of the Third World is a deconstruction of racial stereotyping, a series of bitter comments on an entity created for the convenience of ideologues rather than the people who inhabited it. Needless to say, this kind of thing seldom played well in the packed amphitheatres of early Eighties radical opinion, and Naipaul was regularly sneered at for being a white man’s stooge and a traitor to his skin.
His real interest, on the other hand, lay in exposing one or two of the confidence tricks practised on poor and developing nations in the name of freedom. Thus the preface to North of South wonders what terms like ‘liberation’, ‘revolution’ and ‘socialism’ actually mean ‘to the people — i.e. the masses — who experience them’, before deciding, 300 pages later, that they meant corruption, exploitation and misery.
But there were wider, and at the same time more personal, issues at stake. Born in the backwater of colonial Trinidad, and saved from drudgery by one of the coveted ‘Island Scholarships’ to Oxford that his brother had carried off 15 years earlier, Naipaul took care to populate his novels with people who, denied his luck and intelligence, are engaged upon the much more fundamental task of establishing whether they really exist. Like Tissa, the failed Sri Lankan writer who turns up in An Unfinished Journey’s final fragment, the cast of Fireflies (1970) and The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973) suffer from a condition ‘often to be met with among those who have been colonised’. This is invisibility, lack of authenticity, spiritual deracination. ‘We need to exist in our own eyes,’ Naipaul insists, uncomfortably implicating himself with that first person plural. ‘We need to have some reasonably lucid idea of what we are and who we are.’
The Khojas in Fireflies — a novel that might be thought to give Vidia’s A House for Mr Biswas a run for its money — are fatally representative of this tendency. Second- and third-generation descendants of a steadily less influential and wealthy Indian family, their dreams and aspirations are doomed to failure, not least because of the difficulty they have in deciding what these ambitions are, or calibrating them with the humdrum but determinedly naturalistic world of 1950s Port of Spain that they inhabit.
The focus of these unrequited hopes is ‘Baby’, an obscure and unregarded cousin of the clan, married off in her teens to bus-driving, tart-haunting Ram Lutchman. Like his uncomplaining wife, Ram has schemes in his head — to take up photography; to cultivate his garden; to make men of his sons — only for each newly-minted plan to crumble into dust. When Ram dies of a heart attack, Baby concentrates on the doggedly studious Bhaskar, only for the aspiring doctor to come back from his Indian university with a mental breakdown and their jointly-run chicken farm to be ravaged by avian plague.
The history of the Khojas ends with Baby exiled to the country, managing a friend’s shop but conscious that the opportunity has come too late: ‘Mrs Lutchman had lost her taste for commerce and longed now for nothing.’ On one level Fireflies is an elemental tragedy, a kind of sink of blighted hopes and thwarted longings, in which no one is ever happy and where the future, rushing towards them on an unstoppable conveyor belt, is guaranteed to make them less happy still.
All this, though, is to ignore the vein of humour that irradiates even its darker passages — wistful, usually carrying a mighty sting in their tail but always alert to the comic possibilities of, say, a gadget that fails to operate, or vainglorious Mr Wilkie, Ram’s friend from work, with his phantom adventures among ‘the boys’.
From one angle Mr Khoja, the family’s dignified patriarch, with his dream of an educational system based on Rousseau-esque principles and his plea for a truly disinterested politics, his good intentions baulked by a disabling inability to act, is a figure from Chekhov. From another he is a great Dickensian fantasist, betraying his self-satisfaction with every word he utters.
The humour went out of Naipaul’s work comparatively early on: for all the similarities of its setting — the tribe of ground-down dependents trying to escape from the ties of family and environment — The Chip-Chip Gatherers is a much bleaker performance. A Hot Country (1983), set on the imaginary island of ‘Cuyama’ 20 years after independence is bleaker still. By this time, Naipaul’s wanderings had taken him to Guyana, the subject of Black and White (1980). When his father-in-law diffidently suggested a return to comedy, Naipaul is supposed to have said ‘How can I? I have walked over the bodies in Jonestown.’
What would have happened to Naipaul had he lived? It is difficult to think that his political views would have changed very much, and one can imagine him having a terrific time in post-apartheid South Africa. In the end, you suspect that he would have written a book about England, one of those great insider-outsider novels in which the novelist uses the information allowed him by his adopted country to tear this place of refuge apart. That he never lived to achieve this feat is one of the great tragedies of modern English literature.
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