SOURCE: "The Novelist as Dictator," in Encounter, Vol. XLV, No. 6, December, 1975, pp. 73-6.

In the following excerpt, Spurling argues that Naipaul does not permit his readers to form their own impressions of his characters and their surroundings; instead, he imposes his outlook "dictatorially."

Reviewing a book in The Times [London] early last year, Richard Holmes wrote of "that frontal advance of the biographic form … which now surely promises to make the biography, as a genre, the most fruitful in contemporary English writing." His own special interest in it being so was revealed a few months later when he published a weighty reappraisal of Shelley. All the same it is noticeable that biographies are generally given greater prominence than novels on review pages and that one's acquaintances, even if they haven't read them, are more aware of the latest biography than of the latest novel.

The phenomenon is not...