Essays: One comes away from The Writer and the World with no doubt that "the writer" of the title is singular and particular. These essays are as much about V.S. Naipaul as their many subjects, writes Conor O'Callaghan
He finds in the turbulent post-colonial histories of countries like Mauritius and Guyana a reflection of his own experiences. "I go to places," he remarks, "which, however alien, connect in some way with what I already know."
Because of the political nature of all of these pieces, and the occasion of their commissioning, the nations Naipaul writes about are usually at a crossroads, a unique historical moment. They also cover a time-span of 30 years, and document his gradual change in journalistic style and emphasis. The young writer visiting India in the 1960s is withering and torrential. The mature commentator on the 1984 Republican Party conference in Dallas is more laid-back and humane.
That later essay, 'The Air- Conditioned Bubble', is a classic of its kind and a model of restraint. The deep south venue and the witless excesses of Reaganism at its height present cheap shots a lesser writer would have found irresistible.
Like a trained marksman biding his time, Naipaul uses his sarcasm sparingly. However, when he squeezes the trigger the consequences are invariably fatal. Seeing Jeanne Morrow of Morrow's Nut House handing out complimentary samples in the conference foyer, he can't help himself: "It was extraordinary - so casual the meeting, so grand the lady. It was like running into the owner of Dunkin' Donuts . . . carrying sample bags of his doughnuts".
T.S. Eliot once expressed his belief that all art has its origins in boredom. At times Naipaul writes as if on a crusade to become the laureate of boredom. He reads a biography of Columbus as a story of tedium and banality. Norman Mailer's campaign to become mayor of New York in 1969 is finally consumed by its own dullness. In the landscape of India he sees only "the physical drabness . . . answering the drabness of the mind".
The shorter pieces are structured around three longer essays. One examines the legacy of Peronism in Argentina, its romantic myths and horrible realities. Another drifts among the expatriate community of the Ivory Coast. And a third tells the riveting history of Michael X, the Trinidadian Black Power conman and murderer.
Naipaul warms to the story of Michael X with such obvious relish that his true gift, that of the novelist, takes over. In the end his treatment of the story, with its narrative tension and intimately fondled minutiae, is not so much extended essay as mini-thriller. This is, by his own admission, "a writer's curiosity rather than an ethnographer's or journalist's".
Elsewhere those novelistic impulses are evident in his attention to the language of politics rather than its events, and to material details. He dwells so often on clothes, and their significance to their wearers and occasions, that dress at times threatens to become an independent sub-plot. Zaire's President Mobutu, for example, is described in an elaborately phoney ceremonial costume he designed himself, complete with leopard-skin hat and a stick carved with symbolic figures nobody understands. For uncle and nephew adversaries in an Indian election, dress embodies ideological differences: the traditional dhoti and the Western businessman's suit and tie.
Diana Athill in Stet, her publishing memoir, concedes her occasional discomfort with Sir Vidia's racial attitudes. His essays do seem burdened with a superiority complex. He uses a piece on the Caribbean island of St Kitts to generalise on "the deadly comic-strip humour of Negro politics". He blithely dismisses the Black Power movement as "a sentimental hoax".
And yet calling his writing racist would be simplistic. It would also suggest (wrongly) that he was somehow more forgiving of those races closer to his own ethnic origins.
He admits to visiting India with romantic preconceptions, and then gives over 70 pages to disappointed vitriol. His portrait of that nation - as a filthy quasi-mystical promised land for hitchhiking hippies, populated by golf-playing box wallahs with Anglicised nicknames like Andy and Bunty - would have its literate citizens diving for cover.
The recurring absence of the first person singular would not have been a problem for original audiences reading the articles in isolation. But read as a collection, that absence lends the book a curiously hollow centre. The reader gets little sense of Naipaul's physical presence. Our only sense of him is as a solitary figure, hovering in the margins, chatting with stragglers and mediating the maelstrom through a singular and singularly unsentimental intelligence.
Naipaul finally allows himself to wander centre stage in his postscript, 'Our Universal Civilisation', which acts as a lynchpin for the book. Returning us to the original theme of the writer and the writer's relationship to the world he moves in, this is a personal statement by one of the most esteemed writers of our age. Like all these essays, it is at once elegant and honest, and "without false stresses".
Conor O'Callaghan is a writer, and director of the annual Poetry Now Festival in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown
The Writer and the World: Essays. By V.S. Naipaul. Picador, 524pp. £16.99