Amid the encircling gloom

Africa is the setting for several of V. S. Naipaul’s finest fictional stories — In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Half a Life.

Africa is the setting for several of V. S. Naipaul’s finest fictional stories — In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Half a Life. And there is a pattern to the themes in the African works: fear, post-colonial disintegration, isolation, approaching catastrophe, a sense of being trapped in a way of life that is hovering on the borders of savagery. It is an unforgettable vision, but it remains that of an outsider.

In The Masque of Africa, Naipaul goes deeper; this is the account of a journey through five countries with the purpose of ‘investigating the effects of African belief on the progress of civilisation’. As befits reportage, the style is clipped, sometimes cursory, as though written for a notebook, which may give readers the hope that this could become the prelude to a novel.