often set in colonial times, eventually earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature. In
practice, ‘post-colonial’ is not applied to writing from the old white Commonwealth
but to that of descendants of immigrants from more recent colonies; such as
Timothy Mo (b. Hong Kong, 1950), author ofSour Sweet(1982) and An Insular
Possession(1986), and Hanif Kureishi (1954– ), author ofThe Buddha of Suburbia
(1990). Every label is a potential libel, and to categorize British-born or British-
educated writers as ‘post-colonial’ sets literature written and published in Britain in
a political retrospect which may narrow expectation.
Holding a mirror up to society, politically or otherwise, is one of literature’s func-
tions, especially in the realist novel, but not the only one. Ultimately the test of
whether a piece of writing qualifies as literature is whether readers who do not know
its occasion, and might not care about it, wish to re-read it. If this is so, literature is
not for those who approach a book asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’ The reader is on
trial as well as the book. We read to enlarge experience, not to confirm opinion.V. S. Naipaul
In the wide range of writing from the non-white Commonwealth, one author’s work
stands out for its scope, its understanding, its transcendence of the local. The repu-
tation ofV. S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent but a British resident, was
established by his early fiction, set in Trinidad and often comic, as with The Mystic
Masseur(1957),The Suffrage of Elvira(1958),A House for Mr Biswas(1961) and The
Mimic Men(1969), which begins in London. Completing his education at Oxford,
and resident in Britain, Naipaul then travelled the ex-colonial world, attending espe-
cially to the Indian diaspora, and has published much non-fiction, as in Area of
Darkness,A Bend in the River,In a Free State,Enigma of Arrival. His reportage is
scrupulous,rational and impartial;the stories and conversations he brings from
post-independence societies often show them as inefficient, corrupt and riven by
sectional interests. Naipaul, an enlightened rationalist, Brahmin in his detachment
and not easily pleased,does not mind imparting unwelcome truths. His later writ-
ing on India has his usual penetration, detachment and understanding, but more
compassion. He was the first novelist to register the importance of mass migration,
the first to see ex-colonials in Britain primarily as British citizens. His Beyond Belief
showed oil money being used to export fundamentalist Islamism. Naipaul has influ-
enced later writers with links to the sub-continent. He looks back in calm gloom,
whereas Salman Rushdie finds, or found, a hectic comedy in the confusions of the
present. When the Prime Minister, Mr Blair, invited the pop-stars and footballers of
what was called Cool Britannia to Downing Street, V. S. Naipaul dismissed New
Labour as a government of philistines. Dr Johnson wrote in the Preface to his
Dictionarythat ‘The chief glory of every people arises from its authors’. Authors may
agree,and so might readers of literary histories, but it is not a truth universally
acknowledged. The leaders of political parties in a popular democracy, if they think
about authors, know that this is not an important electoral constituency. Knighted
in 1992, Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, but received no govern-
ment congratulations. Nor is he generally popular with Muslim critics.‘Multi-culturalism’
Writers from many former colonies contribute greatly to British fiction. Lively Anglo
writing has come from writers such as the Nigerian political exile Wole Soyinka, or424 15 · CONTEMPORARIES