Bleak expectations

Shiva Naipaul died unexpectedly in the summer of 1985, six months after his 40th birthday. In his decade and a half on Grub Street, he published three novels, a brace of polemical travelogues and the scintillating miscellany of stories and occasional pieces collected in Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (1984). An Unfinished Journey, an account of a Sri Lankan trip, whose 80th page he had reached when he suffered the heart attack that killed him, was issued posthumously in 1986. He was much loved (see the portrait by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in Absent Friends, 1989), much admired, much abused and — almost inevitably, given some of the things he wrote about — much misunderstood. The memorial essay prize instituted in his name by The Spectator after his death has been revived this year.

Like his older brother Vidia, Shiva could be an intimidating presence, both on the page and off it. A year before his death a producer at the fledgling Channel 4 — a rather more highbrow concern in those days — commissioned a piece from him entitled The Illusion of the Third World. The essay, later published in this magazine, was delivered without props, direct to a camera that, thanks to some technical quirk, grew nearer and nearer as the programme unwound. By the close, all that remained was Naipaul’s face, flushed, hectic and accusing, in grotesquely exaggerated close-up, as he declared that in the name of the Third World we ‘maddened ourselves with untruth’.

The Illusion of the Third World is a deconstruction of racial stereotyping, a series of bitter comments on an entity created for the convenience of ideologues rather than the people who inhabited it. Needless to say, this kind of thing seldom played well in the packed amphitheatres of early Eighties radical opinion, and Naipaul was regularly sneered at for being a white man’s stooge and a traitor to his skin.