Africa has become remote again, a mystery to be explained—at which point enter V. S. Naipaul with a book of wonderful authority and wisdom [A Bend in the River]. (p. 791)
In the sense that the narrative is conceived essentially as a political pageant in which a parvenu attempts to impose order on chaos, or rather a new chaos on the old. Naipaul's book might be said to be deficient in the conventional tensions of fiction. The interrelationships of the characters are nebulous, their development speculative; most of them are archetypes rather than individuals….
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