In The Pleasures of Exile George Lamming scolded V. S. Naipaul, as he no doubt would his younger brother Shiva, for taking too soft a line on Trinidadian social conditions, for being smug when he ought to be angry, for writing 'castrated satire'…. What the Naipauls write is irony, not satire, and irony is by definition non-militant…. Caribbean social conditions have for them, qua novelists, an imaginative significance only.

It is true that a primitive society offers a Hobson's choice of styles to its authors: tantrumese, noble-savagery, or a combination of irony and pathos. But like all limitations this brings special liberties. Irony and pathos are essentially downward-looking viewpoints, so a society of grotesques, fools, snobs, show-offs, martinets and ingenues who think and talk in illiterate clichés has obvious perks for a writer with as delicate a touch as Shiva Naipaul…. Although Mr Naipaul must, so to...