Book review: The World Is What It Is, Patrick French (2008)

This authorised biography of VS Naipaul was a let-down. I got about 50 pages into the work before getting bored with its complexity and with its fundamental ordinariness. The author tries to lend some variety and interest by inserting an introduction that has at its centre the VS Naipaul post-Nobel Prize being feted by the beau monde, but after that the book just does the usual biography thing of starting at the beginning, with the migration of the writer’s ancestors to Trinidad in the late 19th century, and ploughing on down the field in a straight line.

You get a straight-up, bald chronology: the birth of the writer’s grandparents and parents, and the family set-up. I presume that “Ma” is Naipaul’s mother and “Pa” is his father but the identities of the other family members who appear in the dizzying whirl of French’s detailed story are almost entirely opaque. This is a problem you often get with journalists, too. The person who is familiar with the story and who is writing it uses shorthand (such as given names and nicknames, sometimes using one or the other in different parts of the story to refer to the same person) and the person reading the work is left completely lost in the rapid comings and goings of people who are part of the tale. I thought this a fatal flaw in a biography that purports to be conclusive and exhaustive. Especially in one that is so conventional in its execution. If you must make the story boring at least you can make it clear. In French’s case, the story is both boring and obscure.

What is clear however is that Naipaul came from poverty in a place where identities were fluid because there were so many different cultures represented on the island, each with its own traditions, ways of speaking, and cuisine. People remade their identities and even, as seems apparent in the case of Naipaul’s forebears, made stuff up in order to get ahead in the competitive island economy. They arrived in the years after slavery was abolished by the British, in an era when alternative sources of labour were sought in order to keep the sugar industry afloat. Indentured servitude was the answer, and India, especially places in the north of the country, was the answer to the needs of Capital.

Naipaul’s maternal grandmother (I think I’m getting this right but correct me if I’m wrong) was a capitalist who owned a portfolio of properties and controlled the family with a firm hand. There was no love lost between members of the extended family, who often had to live together in the same dwellings.

No wonder the writer was so keen to turn his back on his past. Standing resolute among all of this unhappiness however the figure of Naipaul’s father remains always on the side of the angels. A journalist and published author of fiction, this man gave the young Vidia important tips about economy in writing that evidently served to help him as he grew up with ambitions in the same direction. The character of Vidia’s mother is less well-drawn but his father suffered from a mental illness so the mother must have been a strong influence on his upbringing. The young Vidia was a bit of a prodigy who enjoyed school and did well in exams.