I will not write fiction any more: VS Naipaul

Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, 72, says he won?t be writing fiction any more. The most famous writer of Indian origin alive today says he prefers to focus on the complexities of the real world.

Future of the novel

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The novel's time is over. Only nonfiction can capture the complexities of today's world. What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form is going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatise it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.

I thought if I didn't have this resource of nonfiction I would have dried up perhaps. I'd have come to the end of my material, and would have done what a writer like Graham Greene did. You know, he took the Greene figure to the Congo, took him to Argentina, took him to Haiti, for no rhyme or reason.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's OK, but it's of no account. If you're a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, et cetera, give a little narrative here and there. But again, it's of no account.

The clash of beliefs

What is of account is the larger global political situation — in particular, the clash between belief and unbelief in postcolonial societies. I became interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and make a narrative of that discovery.

To what extent had people who lock themselves away in belief . . . shut themselves away from the active busy world. To what extent, without knowing it, were they parasitic on that world? And why did they have no thinkers to point out to them where their thoughts and their passion had led them?

On Islamic terror

What happened on September 11 was too astonishing. It can't happen again. But in the end it has had no effect on the world. It has just been a spectacle, like a bank raid in a western film. They will be caught by the sheriff eventually.

The bigger issue is that Western Europe, while built on tolerance, today lacks a strong cultural life, making it vulnerable to Islamicization. Muslim women shouldn't wear headscarves in the West. If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.

The debate in Britain about detainees held at Guantánamo Bay is evidence of foolishness. People here talk about those people who were picked up by the Americans as “lads,” “our lads,” as though they were people playing cricket or marbles. It's glib, nonsensical talk from people who don't understand that holy war for Muslims is a religious war, and a religious war is something you never stop fighting.

The decline of Western civilisation

That's a romantic idea. A civilisation which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. It's a university idea. People cook it up at universities and do a lot of lectures about it. It has no substance. The philosophical diffidence of the West will prevail over the philosophical shriek of those who intend to destroy it.

On India

India is a place of great hope. It is the country where belief and unbelief coexist most peaceably. The economic development of India — and China — will completely alter the world and nothing that's happening in the Arab world has that capacity. But it is a calamity that, even with its billion people, there are no thinkers in India today.

On history

The only theory is that everything is in a state of flux. This is my own personal idea, but one linked to a philosophical concept in Indian religion.

I find it impossible to contain the history of Europe in my head. It's so much movement, so much movement. Even when you go back to the Roman times there are these tribal groups pressing all the time, pressing and pressing and pressing.

I have recently been reading the letters of Mary Wortley Montagu, an Englishwoman who travelled across the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century. You have this picture of the devastation the Turks had created in Hungary. Who ever thought that world would have changed if you were living at that time? But it has changed. And what we're living in will of course change again.