SOURCE: "A Novel for Our Time: V. S. Naipaul's Guerrillas," in The Failure of Theory: Essays on Criticism and Contemporary Fiction, The Harvester Press, 1987, pp. 185-206.

In the following essay, Parrinder addresses a number of themes in Guerrillas, including the notion of the "Noble Robber" and sexual violation.

I

I think there's an element of nostalgia in reading Hardy, and even in reading Dickens or George Eliot. There is narrative there, the slow development of character, and people are longing for this vanished, ordered world. Today, every man's experience of dislocation is so private that unless a writer absolutely matches that particular man's experience the writer seems very private and obscure. So I think the art of fiction is becoming a curious, shattered thing…. I think it may be that the world now requires another kind of imaginative interpretation.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But...