Although from different generations, Capildeo and Naipaul were cousins, and — having made my choices here without making this connection — I now see some shared qualities in their feeling for the post-colonial double exposure of place, as well as the deep history of English eloquence. The first part of The Enigma of Arrival, titled “Jack’s Garden”, appears to be a ruminative memoir of Naipaul’s experience of moving to the English countryside — specifically, Wiltshire — and gradually acclimatising to its ways. But then you realise he has somehow hypnotised you with his reflective narration in order to tell, obliquely, the nested stories of his neighbours, including Jack, his wife, and Jack’s father-in-law. 

There is something beautifully looping about the construction of Naipaul’s prose, throwing out lines of thought as leisurely as country walks, only to pull them tight like a trapper’s snare. This happens in the study of the father-in-law, who is introduced as “a Wordsworthian figure, bent, exaggeratedly bent, going gravely about his peasant tasks, as if in an immense Lake District solitude”. A recurring theme is the narrator’s attempt to reconcile the pre-industrial English pastoral that he absorbed from books in 1940s Trinidad and 1950s Oxford with the 1980s factory farming on his doorstep. Here, his allusion to Wordsworth — who was, of course, writing about the effects of industrialisation too — signals a novelist’s homage. In the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth argued that the language of poetry should not differ ‘from that of good prose’. Instead, he ensured poetic elevation through the passionate repetition of phrasing — and this is also one of the secrets of Naipaul’s miraculously steady and clear-eyed prose style. When the father-in-law is met “actually with a load of wood on his back: Wordsworthian, the subject of a poem Wordsworth might have called ‘The Fuel-Gatherer’”, the narrator sketches a man whom he only ever hears speak one word (“Dogs?”). Intensely observing his daily habits, Naipaul describes — with deepening sympathy — how the old man constructs a habitual “run” across the landscape, ignoring new boundaries by covering barbed wire with plastic sacking if necessary. 

At the end of the vignette, which covers a few pages, this last, unravelling sentence delivers a blow of pathos as profound as one of my favourite Lyrical Ballads, “The Last of the Flock”: “And so strong were the reminders of the old man’s presence, so much of his spirit appeared to hover over his run, over his stiles and steps and those oddly-place rolled-up plastic sack, even those he had rolled up and tied long ago and which were shredding now, plastic without its shine, blue turning to white, so much did all this speak of the old man moving slowly back and forth on his own errands, that it was some time before it occurred to me that I had not seen him for a while.”

First published in The Enigma of Arrival: a novel in five sections, Penguin, 1987; new edition with author’s preface, Picador, 2011