ABSTRACT
When in 1989 Vidiadhur Surajprasad Naipaul was decorated with the Trinity Cross, Trinidad's highest honour, the wheel had come full circle. His first novels of Trinidad life, The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira, prompted George Lamming to accuse him of writing 'castrated satire': 'Naipaul, with the diabolical help of Oxford University, has done a thorough job of wiping out of his guts'. The 'dancing dwarf' intimates Naipaul's disembodied stance in the early novels, in which nothing prepared the reader for the warmth and complexity of A House for Mr Biswas. The novel becomes a meditation on the relationship between 'reality' and the craft: of fiction. A Bend in the River again intercuts fiction and history, drawing on Naipaul's travelogues, 'A New King for the Congo' and A Congo Diary, published in 1980. A Way in the Worldcontinues Naipaul's experiment with diverse forms of narrative discourse.
