The old order changeth not
AUBERON WAUGH
Fireflies Shiva Naipaul (Andre Deutsch £2 2s)
Newbury has only one bookseller, unless you count W. H. Smith. He is called Mr Nicholas Scarf, and his shop, in the Oxford Road, is what passes for the cultural centre of the neighbourhood. Inevitably, it was to
this place that this novel reviewer repaired, having extracted Shiva Naipaul's Fireflies from the pile of this week's new novels. "Fiction?" said Mr Scarf, running a jaun- diced eye over all the alluring dust jackets. A less self-controlled man would have been awakened to a sexual frenzy on the spot. "I am afraid that we may have to close down our fiction side entirely. You can't sell fiction in Newbury these days."
This last sentence, mutatis mutandis, might have come straight from Mr Nai- paul's novel. Perhaps fiction still sells won- derfully in Port of Spain, but he describes the deterioration and collapse of a social order, with exactly the same degree of rueful self-mockery as my bookseller friend. What sort of fiction has he ever been able to sell in Newbury? The sad truth remains that nowadays he can sell none. One of the many unsavoury characteristics of our age is that whereas the spread of education has vastly increased the number of those who wish to write novels, it has actually reduced the number of those who wish to read them. At the same time, the State's seizure and redistribution of author's copyright, through the free libraries system, ensures that even those authors who are read must, with grotesquely few exceptions, either live in penury or take some other employment and make writing a hobby. Etcetera, etcetera.
So any welcome we extend to Mr Shiva Naipaul must be accompanied by something more than conventional protestations about its inadequacy. We are ushering him into a small incestuous and fratricidal world, populated by more than its fair share of charlatans, paranoiacs, megalomaniacs, social and emotional cripples, failures of all sorts and the sub-intellectual, sub political detritus of our civilisation. If it were part of the reviewer's job to give sound, worldly advice to young authors, my advice to young Shiva would be to forget all about writing and apply for some sensible job with London Transport, either conducting its buses or driving its trains underground.
With that reservation out of the way, one must go on to say that however few people may ever take the trouble to read it, let alone buy it, Mr Shiva Naipaul's first novel is a masterpiece. It's a long book—tinusu- _ ally good value at two pounds—and a re- viewer's first inclination, when confronted with a long book, is to see what he can safely skip. It must say something for Mr Naipaul's power that despite a firm deter- mination to skip whole pages and even whole chapters at a time, I was unable to miss a page of his absorbing, inconsequen- tial narrative.
The story, as I may have indicated, cen- tres around the disintegration of one family in Trinidad's upper-class Indian community. As subjects go, this might not seem to be one which automatically commands a wide readership. Those who approach novel-- reading as a vehicle for self-improvement might be prepared to accept some (passion- ately) involved, committed, compassionate etc. treatise on the problems of Trinidad's Indians, or even a biting satire on Trini- dad's upper class, but a poignant, uncom- mitted account of what it is to be a conser- vative, upper-class Trinidadian Hindu in our present deplorable age is more than most people are prepared to take even in World Conservation Year. I can only report that the book is a delight and a miracle of enjoy- ment.
So far as he tells a story—in fact, he tells dozens—it is the story of various misfor- tunes which befall a junior niece in one of Trinidad's most important Indian families.
the Khojas. Far more important than the niece however, is the description of bland, idle, incompetent Gorind Khoja, who is
bead of the family and, under the old dis- pensation, something very close to God in
the eyes of all his relations. Then the modern age, represented by material jealousies, be- gins to disturb the tenor of this slightly moribund arrangement, and miseries abound.
Mr Naipaul's own attitude to the society he describes is ambivalent. He satirises its absurdities with conventional rigour but he is also keenly alive to the tragedy of its destruction, and it is this quality which makes his book so exceptional. For an English reader, and most especially, per- haps, for an English conservative, the poign- ancy is doubly acute because of the extreme unfamiliarity of the society he describes. Various attempts have been made to de- monstrate the tragedy of the old order changing in England, and these have met with varied degrees of success. The chief 'difficulty has been that an English reader- ship is close enough to the situation to see the odious and bogus aspects of the old order, as well as those of the new. In any case, that particular ground has been more than adequately covered in fiction. Now we are reduced to the spectacle of obsequious journalists publishing a biography of some pipsqueak politician and inviting us to accept, as part of the sales patter, that the cheapjack Tory face staring at us from the cover somehow embodies all the glory and absurdity of our aristocratic heritage.
But the Douglas-Homes of Trinidad's Indian community are infinitely more cred- ible, and infinitely more lovable. The old order is also rather more inviting, with its Negro servants called Blackie and its Negro boys in the street, occasionally per- mitted to field for sons of the upper-class Indian community, and even to bowl to them, but never to bat. One begins to under- stand what our Westminster Khojas mean when they talk, in their semi-articulate, way about the need for us to remain among the first four batsmen in the world's first eleven. It is a convention qn these occasions that one should not compare Mr Shiva Naipaul with his distinguished novelist brother, Vidia. Few other people, would mind being
compared with V. S. Naipaul, but on one's first appearance as the SPECTATOR'S resident novel reviewer, one must observe the con- ventions. Suffice to say that anyone who misses reading Shiva Naipaul's Fireflies will miss an entirely delightful experience, and since few people will read it anyway, we must just accept the tragedy of the situation. Perhaps his writing career will bring him 10 the point of reviewing novels for a weekly newspaper. One wishes him luck whatever he does.
Previous page
