In Naipaul's novels we trace the fortunes of the imaginative dreamer, the 'trickster' or fantasist of bookish disposition whose dreams eventually find outlets and leave some small imprint on the world. Such a character is happiest in the rare moments of pure creativity, of the uncomplicated fulfilment of the literary urge. But these manifestations of the literary spirit are paradoxical since, though in the author's eyes they represent a fulfilment, his characters experience them as intense desire. The result of pursuing this desire is, as often as not, a travestying of the original impulse; and this is portrayed by Naipaul in tones which range from the lightest and gayest of ironies to the deepest sense of outrage and disgust. If he shows literacy as civilised man's most powerful instrument of self-assertion, it is at the price of revealing its subjection to all the defeats, distortions and violations imposed on the self by the modern world. (p. 6)
Naipaul's first published novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957), is a comedy of literary and cultural confusion which may be compared with the early Evelyn Waugh (as the author himself has suggested) or, alternatively, with H. G. Wells's The History of Mr Polly. Ganesh Ransumair, the first of a line of literary fantasists, is the traditional pundit or holy man transported to Trinidad, where he becomes masseur, witch-doctor and owner of four hundred volumes of Everyman's Library and two hundred Penguins. His romance with the written word begins, appropriately enough, in the local printing-shop, where he suddenly announces that he intends to write a book:
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