Shiva Naipaul is… complicated. Or perhaps one should say difficult. Not in the sense of an inordinatedly dense narrative with heavy psychological underpinnings – although he is prey to a fair amount of schematic or symbolic portrayals, rather it is a sort of deliberate ambiguity in his novels. Detachment is his stylistic terrain. He writes like Coetzee with economical and careful prose. No one is likable – which would not be a problem if it wasn’t for the niggling notion that he doesn’t like his characters. Their travails embody futility. He writes of a peculiar type of madness, that of the mongrelised in a mongrelised country. The original sin of the Caribbean is race and it deserves such an observer and the attending caustic and limpid prose.