Modern Language Review

The First Naipaul World Epics is a collection of articles that focuses on Naipaul’s initial seven books. This encompasses his first five novels as well as two travelogues—one of which is the highly contentious The Middle Passage (1962)— that were originally published between 1957 and 1964. The book is intended to be the first of a series of works that draws together critical thinking about the full range of the author’s prodigious career, and is an offshoot of a digital collation project on Naipaul that is based at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine.

The articles themselves were mostly written in the last fifteen years, with the exception of a piece on Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963) by John Thieme which first appeared as a journal article in 1984. As might have been expected, there are contributions by renowned UWI scholars such as Paula Morgan, Kenneth Ramchand, and Gordon Rohlehr, interspersed with writing by newer voices from universities around the globe. The selection of contributions, which vary in length, style, and critical perspective, has been guided by an emphasis on the ‘element of affect that impacts readers of Naipaul’s work’ (p. 3), rather than any unifying, alternative, or controversial perspective on his writing per se.

With such a varied content, it is no easy task to summarize what this book offers anew for those interested in the study of Naipaul and his early writing. It is certainly a worthwhile project to draw together articles that deal with specific elements of the author’s output, but in reality this only serves to demonstrate how Naipaul [End Page 267] continues to divide opinion, even with his so-called ‘comic’ works of fiction. A few of the articles do suggest something of a more nuanced reading of Naipaul’s early fiction than previously offered, including those by Bhoendradatt Tewarie and Aaron Eastley, who both argue that Naipaul’s vision of Caribbean politics was far closer to reality than many would choose to acknowledge. However, writing about The Mystic Masseur (1958) or The Suffrage of Elvira (1959) from a twenty-first century perspective is necessarily a very different prospect from what was experienced by earlier readers, who felt only the lash of ‘Naipaul’s predominantly hostile assertions’ (p. 203) without acknowledging that if ‘read as metaphor, Naipaul’s [. . .] first fiction [is] insightful’ (p. 230).

As far as Naipaul’s travelogues are concerned, the articles by Kenneth Ramchand (‘Did V. S. Naipaul Hate Trinidad?’) and Robert J. Balfour (‘Among the Unbelievable’) also argue for a re-evaluation of at least some of the writer’s more controversial views and comments. Both suggest that Naipaul may have expressed ‘rage’ at things he saw, but this was because of his passion for understanding what had been lost with the arrival of Islam (Balfour, p. 321) or out of his ‘love for the island of his birth’ (Ramchand, p. 199). However, both critics also acknowledge that this cannot explain away all of Naipaul’s challenging and provocative remarks about the peoples and lands he visited, nor will any such understanding necessarily change the views of many who read his work.

So where does this leave us? The editor asserts that these essays ‘are meant to develop the idea that literature has power to transform our lives and to exemplify the value of continued attention to Naipaul’s work towards this end’ (p. 13). As this latest book shows, it is certainly true that Naipaul’s early writing continues to be of interest to scholars (re-)evaluating debates about colonization and its aftermath, although it also appears that the value of those views remains as questionable and contested as ever. Perhaps that will continue to be Naipaul’s greatest legacy—the power to continually challenge his readers, even if not necessarily in a transformative manner.