Few would deny that VS Naipaul has been one of the most innovative and interesting writers living in Britain; he was also, from the late 1950s until the mid-1980s, one of the seminal figures of postcolonial literature. At his best, his prose was distinguished by its startling clarity and precision, its spare and deceptive simplicity and its penetrating directness and honesty.

Naipaul’s early work was his most accessible: his warm, lively comic novels set in Trinidad opened up a new world to readers in the late 1950s. If Kingsley Amis represented the shift in class that took place in English letters after the war, so Naipaul represented the beginning of the shift in ethnicity that was later to see the triumph of writers such as Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Naipaul’s work deepened and darkened. He shed his earlier joie de vivre and began to assume the persona of a post-colonial Conrad, coolly examining the painful wounds left both by European colonialism and its sudden retreat. Here he was at his best: the detached outsider, struggling to understand, taking the time to go to places and talk to people, to drill away at them and expose them with their own words. Even when one disagreed with his views – such as his relentlessly negative assessment of Islam – it was impossible to deny the power of his writing.

From the mid-1980s, however, as he grew older and grander, Naipaul became more self-absorbed and increasingly made himself his own subject. First, in Finding the Centre, then in The Enigma of Arrival, and thereafter in numerous essays and fragments of autobiography (A Way in the World, A Writer and the World, Literary Occasions, Reading and Writing), he turned his vision inward. He wrote of the trials and struggles he endured as a young writer trying to find his voice, of his “jangling nerves”, the “pain” of his creativity.

A Writer’s People, published just after Naipaul’s 75th birthday, continues to mine this familiar seam, but now with ever-diminishing returns. The constant emphasis on his pain and anxiety seems increasingly overdone: after all, Naipaul had family in London who put him up; he was never hungry or without income; his books had immediate success.

There is, in fact, little in this volume that we have not heard before: we have already read about his scorn for the “half-made” society of the Caribbean, the example of his father, his views on Gandhi and Nirad Chaudhuri, and so on. All that is new is the relentlessness of his self-obsession, and the now comprehensive nature of his contempt for everyone and everything he writes about.

Naipaul was once a penetrating and unpredictable literary critic, but in A Writer’s People criticism has been reduced to a series of spiky provocations (“personal prejudice can be amusing in the autobiographical mode,” he writes) interspersed with brisk assassinations of his perceived rivals: A Passage to India has “no meaning”; Derek Walcott grew “stagnant” after his first book of poems; Evelyn Waugh is “mannered [and] flippant”; Anthony Powell’s writing is “overexplained” and his characters are “one-dimensional”; Chaudhuri is “vain and mad”; Henry James writes only “sweet nothings”; Philip Larkin is “a minor poet”; Flaubert after Madame Bovary descended into “artificiality” and wrote “bad 19th-century fiction”.

Naipaul’s view of the places that moulded him are no less sour: Trinidad “had nothing that could be called a civilisation” and was ultimately a “spiritual emptiness”; Oxford students were “provincial and mean and common”; India has “no autonomous intellectual life” and its fiction, successful though it may be, is still largely mimicry and “imitation”.

In small doses this is all amusing in a curmudgeonly, grumpy-grandfather sort of way; at length it is at first tedious, then distasteful. Naipaul’s theme is about “vision, ways of seeing and feeling”; yet in this work, more than ever, he is blinded by his ego, by his vanity and strong prejudices, and much of what he writes is simply lazy, mean-minded and frequently offensive nonsense: this is especially true when he writes with deep contempt of the “Bible-crazed Negro” of his Caribbean upbringing.

More surprising, Naipaul’s discussion of Gandhi is superficial and dull: far more can be learnt about this fascinatingly complex man in the introductory passage of Kathryn Tidrick’s brilliant 2006 biography than the two repetitive chapters that Naipaul produces here. Likewise, his assertion that India has no intellectual life or literary criticism is wrong: the universities in India are buzzing with the same vibrant life that one sees today in Indian commerce, and the country is exporting academics at an unprecedented rate to Oxbridge and the Ivy League; and, in Biblio, India has a literary journal that compares favourably in many ways with the Times Literary Supplement.

Ultimately, this is a grand old man’s book: meandering, ponderous and pedantic, full of narcissism and touchy self-regard; it is as if Naipaul’s famous Olympian disdain has finally left him exhausted – the acidity of his own derision now makes him write contemptuously even of those he once loved and admired.

There is a tragedy here. As Philip Roth has so dramatically shown, old age need not mean the end of a great writer’s productivity. Humility, energy and ambition can still spur even the finest author to attempt to scale ever greater peaks. Naipaul, in contrast, has died as a writer: the more he records about his calling, the more impotent his pen seems to have become. The wisdom, the warmth, the humour, and, above all, the compassion have all gone from the prose; what we are left with is the bitter and desiccated husk of that once lively, warm and surprising writer from the village outside Port of Spain.

Buy A WRITER’S PEOPLE: A Way of Looking and Feeling by VS Naipaul
Picador £16.99 pp256

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