The novelist V.S. Naipaul yesterday achieved the wildest dream of his iron-willed, sometimes viper-tongued and initially impoverished lifetime by winning this year's Nobel prize for literature. The grandson of a Brahmin indentured labourer in Trinidad, receives the prize for his "incorruptible scrutiny" of the passing of colonialism and of the forgotten history of the vanquished.
The artist of displacement, Naipaul (69) is one of the most elegant of prose stylists. The honouring of the Trinidadian-Indian writer who chose to settle in England in 1955, is not a surprise. Speculations about Naipaul and the prize have prize been rife for so long many commentators simply became weary with waiting. However, the prize has finally come his way and is welcome particularly in the wake of his superb recent novel of escape, despair and sexual discovery, Half A Life. Although enthusiastically reviewed, it, his first novel in seven years, and his finest since the publication of his best book, The Enigma of Arrival (1987), did not feature on the Booker short-list, the Nobel Prize should compensate.
It should also redirect interest in Naipaul's work as a writer after intense and unpleasant focus on his life and the end of his friendship with Paul Theroux. Naipaul's personality suffered further scrutiny following unflattering revelations by his former editor, Diana Athill.
For a writer who has sustained a quality of distance, Naipaul has always drawn on his life by being autobiographical, rather than blatantly confessional. The Trinidadian son of Hindu parents, he quickly found himself outside both cultures, and although he has written about the Caribbean and India, has done so in the tradition of the English rather than West Indian novel.
His early influence was H.G. Wells, but also Austen, and he has also been called Conrad's heir.
At Oxford, an isolated Naipaul read English but denounced the course as having little to do with literature. He has never lost his fascination with the process of the making of a writer - namely himself - and it has proved the most constant personal theme in his fiction.
But Naipaul's complex, melancholic, rather pessimistic vision far exceeds the personal. His first three books - the novels The Mystic Masseur (1957) and The Suffrage of Elivera (1958) and the excellent short story collection, Miguel Street, all set in Trinidad are comedies of manners. The House for Mr Biswas (1961), also set in Trinidad, not only centres on the likeable eponymous anti-hero, it chronicles change and the end of a way of life. It marked his artistic maturity. Naipaul the storyteller quickly broadened his vision to explore cultural and political realities. In a Free State won the 1971 Booker Prize. It brings together his great themes of displacement and the crisis of identity and nationality. A Bend in the River (1979), about the horrors of the emerging Africa, is his variation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
There is another side: Naipaul as travel writer - most impressively on India - essayist, political and cultural commentator. If viewed as cantankerous, he is also a subtle, at times witty, writer, and, as his recent criticism of Islam suggests, courageous.
His body of work, spanning the late 1950s to the present, justifies this prize. He is a deserving winner on the strength of The Enigma of Arrival alone. No one will dispute Naipaul the outsider as laureate; most will celebrate. He is the first British novelist to win the Nobel since William Golding in 1983 and the first writer in English since Seamus Heaney in 1995.
