A Nobel for Mr. Naipaul

FORTY-FIVE YEARS after he published The Mystic Masseur - the hilarious journey of a failed school teacher who becomes a revered mystic - Mr. V. S. Naipaul has been decorated with the Nobel Prize for Literature. It has been a period marked by a remarkable literary fertility in the life of this immensely gifted and exasperatingly controversial man. Twenty-six books in all - a mix of novels (some humorous, some painfully melancholic and many dealing with his pet themes of displacement and migrancy) and travel books (unfailingly provocative and frequently open to accusations of racism and prejudice). Arguably, the best works of this outspoken Trinidad-born writer were his early novels, the most notable of them being A House for Mr. Biswas, a wry and humorous look at the life of an unlikely rebel and the confusing tussles within his family. Although written in an unsentimental style, there was an affectionate and genial underpinning to his early novels. His later works often failed to recapture that early warmth and seemed to reflect a man who was less at ease with himself, with others around him and the world he lived in.

His prose though remained steady and undiminished - delicate and precise, the words apparently chosen with great care and strung out in sentences constructed in an exacting and fastidious way. In some ways he was a man without a country, the lack of roots resulting in an incapacity to identify with people or cultures, an attribute which shaped his perspective on many subjects, which he approached or dealt with not unlike a curious anthropologist or, at any rate, an outsider. In announcing the award, the Swedish Academy has singled out The Enigma of Arrival, Mr. Naipaul's melancholic autobiographical novel of migration and arrival in England in which change and decay are examined through the unsparing and finicky eyes of a foreigner. Mr. Naipaul has been no stranger to controversy, which his critics maintain he has actively courted. His first two books on India, An Area of Darkness and A Wounded Civilisation - with descriptions of squatters beside railway tracks and portrayals of Indians as a people crushed and broken by invasion and conquest - drew howls of injured protest in this country.

Later, his literary excursions among the ``converted people'' in countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia and Malaysia (Among the Believers and Beyond Belief) would wound a number of people because of their representation of Islam as fundamentally an Arabic religion and their unflattering accounts of the effects of conversion. Mr. Naipaul's unsparing - even offensive - views have led some to portray him as a sneaking advocate of a cerebral or abstruse form of Hindutva. But this is to put a somewhat simplistic spin on the opinions of a man, who has, as one board member of the Swedish Academy noted, been ``very critical of all religions''. It will be no surprise if Mr. Naipaul's Nobel generates a fair measure of controversy, just as last year's award to the exiled Chinese novelist, Mr. Gao Xingjuan, did. The reasons for the criticism will of course be different. While Mr. Naipaul would like to be regarded as an independent thinker, one who was beyond ideology or influence, his detractors believe he is a reactionary, a man who attempts to dress up his thinly disguised prejudices in the garb of a courageous love for veracity. On the quality of his prose though, there should be no debate. Many of his fiercest critics acknowledge as much, including the writer Mr. Paul Theroux, a close friend who went on to become one of Mr. Naipaul's fiercest critics. And so, while those responsible for awarding the Nobel prize to Mr. Naipaul may have committed an act of gross political incorrectness, they can hardly be faulted on the grounds of literary merit - which, at the end of the day, is perhaps what prizes for literature are all about.

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