In this colourful biography of Naipaul, Patrick French unravels the enigmatic genius with all his quirks, insecurities and troubled relationships.

Surely the most curious thing about Patrick French’s biography of V.S. Naipaul is that it has been published in the lifetime of its subject. An authorised biography, it draws extensively on “more than 50,000 pieces of paper” — including the journals of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale, that Naipaul had never read — from an archive sold to an American university in 1993. In his introduction to what he sees as “perhaps the last literary biography to be written from a complete paper archive”, French reminds us that Naipaul’s support for the project and his readiness to let it be published in his lifetime were “at once an act of narcissism and humility”.

This carefully researched biography, the result of several years of work by the author of Younghusband and

Tibet, Tibet, traces the formation of Naipaul’s writing career and the evolution of such compelling novels like A House for Mr Biswas and such provocative works like An Area of Darkness and Beyond Belief. French draws on candid conversations with Naipaul that the biographer, declining to play the “house liberal”, weaves into the pages without further comment. But in his introduction, French goes to the heart of Naipaul’s conviction about his literary calling: “It may have begun as a pose, but it was a mask that had eaten into the face.”

French tells the story of the writer’s life — the birth in an impoverished family in Trinidad, a land that he would reject early in his career; the brooding fascination for India in spite of a hatred for its dirt and poverty; and the various travel projects that made him look at the world with his keen, sceptical and too often disdainful eye. We are also treated to some admittedly gossipy but very entertaining background details of Naipaul’s travels around the world, such as Vinod Mehta’s description of the writer’s bewildering sense of entitlement (“It became very difficult for me, because he wanted my car all the time”); Nikhil Lakshman’s anecdote about his tightfistedness (“We went by train, first class... He didn’t pay for the train tickets”) and Nasir Abid’s irritation at his behaviour (“Naipaul could never pronounce my name properly, he cultivated a lot of idiosyncrasies in his mannerisms, in his speech”).

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