The Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 people were killed and a US congressman was shot dead on a Guyanese airstrip, has been written about in dozens of books. Shiva Naipaul met some of those aspiring Jonestown authors loafing on a Georgetown hotel terrace. “Sex. Race. Suicide. Murder. Corruption. A hot Third World country. That’s a classic mix,” one said to him. There have been both forensic and lurid accounts of the Jonestown apocalypse, in which crowds of American expats were forcibly dosed with cyanide-laced Flavor Aid, but nothing comes closer to its dark, post-colonial heart than Journey to Nowhere. The book was first published in 1981, three years after the massacre, but fell out of publication. It’s now been reissued by Outsider Editions, a new imprint dedicated to republishing lost classics.

The Spectator once ran the Shiva Naipaul Award, whose rubric talked about encouraging the “observation of alien cultures” rather than conventional travelogues. The award was a memorial. Naipaul died of a heart attack in August 1985, six months after his 40th birthday, getting up from his typewriter mid-paragraph and never returning. I still have the program from his memorial service, held in the early-December chill of an old London hall. I arrived early and had to endure several moments of nerve-racking small talk with V.S., the elder, more famous Naipaul. Martin Amis read from Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.”

The problem with the ‘Third World,’ Naipaul maintains, is that it does not and cannot exist

The problem with the ‘Third World,’ Naipaul maintains, is that it does not and cannot exist

In strict taxonomic terms, Shiva’s work falls into two main categories. The early novels, Fireflies (1970) and The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973) are comic tragedies set in his native Trinidad (a third novel, 1983’sA Hot Country is less exuberant and was less successful). By the early 1980s, sustained by a fruitful connection with this magazine, Shiva had set himself up as a contrarian essayist, with some withering things to say about fashionable attitudes to what was then becoming known as the “Third World.” The thread of dispossession and anomie runs through all Naipaul’s books. Its theme will be........

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