Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents by Paul Theroux Hamish Hamilton 376pp, £17.99 in UK
Friendship? Crotchety old men, more like. Even at the start of this memoir when V.S. Naipaul, its subject, is a mere thirty-four, he sounds like an inflamed pensioner with a bad case of piles. Now that Paul Theroux has reached a gloomy dissatisfied middle-age, this pair seem like the literary equivalent of Oscar and Felix.
It is hard to like this book because it is so rich in denial and because it is so clearly the work of a writer scorned. But it is a fascinating read because Theroux's response to the ending of their thirty-year friendship is to cannibalise his former pal, the Trinidadian-born writer, V.S. Naipaul, in print.
Theroux uses all sorts of self-conscious posturings to cover the fact that this is, first and foremost, a hatchet-job. He starts archly telling the story as a novel before he abandons the "attempt" with the admonition - "You know I'm lying, don't you? This is not a novel, it's a memory." So, this is memoir as fiction, or fiction as memoir. Take your pick.
The association between The roux and Naipaul began in the Sixties in Uganda. Theroux was teaching at the University of Kampala and Naipaul was on a visiting writer's scholarship. Naipaul immediately adopted the young American. The 24-year-old tyro writer was immensely flattered.
There is something about the earnest spirit of that 24-year-old that pervades this cranky, curmudgeonly book - as cranky and curmudgeonly as the person about whom it is purportedly written.
It seems less a narrative of friendship than one of rivalry between two unpleasant egotists, the younger of the two trying to emulate and then overtake his mentor, the older employed in being self-important and sanctimonious. Perhaps this is what all male friendships are like? Or is it that this one is a "literary friendship" - surely a contradiction in terms?
Whether V.S. Naipaul is as offensive, racist and downright unpleasant as Theroux makes him out to be hardly matters in the end; it's the gap between what this narrative tells us about Theroux, and what he'd like it to tell us about him, that makes it interesting.
He wants us to know how he puts up with rudeness, dismissal and offence, pays for every lunch that he and Naipaul ever shared even when he was penniless and Naipaul was relatively comfortably off, and got dumped without explanation. Much of the time the association seems like an endurance test for Theroux as he waits for crumbs to be thrown from the great man's table. There is something shallow and ingratiating about his enormous pride in having survived so long as Naipaul's friend.
But the more Theroux denigrates Naipaul, the more he reveals about himself, his mean watchfulness, his complicity in Naipaul's worst excesses of snobbery and rudeness, his tendency to indulge in sexual bragging. The net result is that the reader ends up liking Theroux even less than Naipaul and feeling that they richly deserved each other.
But if Sir Vidia's Shadow is low on friendship, it does illuminate other experiences - the journeys Theroux and Naipaul take in Rwanda, in particular, have an eerie premonitory feel to them. There is a wonderfully atmospheric description of the two men meeting in a ghostly, snowbound New York. And there is the rackety life of full-time writers - a review here, workshop there, the dingy rented accommodation, the suffering of their spouses.
Women get short shrift in this world. Pat Naipaul, who had to put up with V.S. until her sorry death, had a thoroughly miserable existence as a household slave, constantly derided and bullied by her husband. Theroux's first wife doesn't even merit being mentioned by name. And Nadira, Naipaul's second wife, is singled out especially for Theroux's spoiled ire, because she is perceived as causing the rift in the men's friendship.
We are left in no doubt that the abiding and important passion is between the men, with Theroux as the long-suffering, faithful companion, thrown aside for a younger, female model, and one - horrors - who can't spell.
And since the pair of them spent much of their time together rating their work as Big or Major or Important, it is a telling irony that their competitive rivalry ends up as the subject of a long, if not a Big, book. As surely Naipaul knew he would, Theroux finally saw the real value of their friendship - as fodder for a book.