By GEORDIE GREIG [Evening Standard] – “I am hoping it is not going to cause a firestorm. It is so not my intention,” says VS Naipaul, Nobel Laureate, English knight of the shires and consumate provocateur, about his latest travel book, The Masque of Africa. “I just wanted to see what made the people tick,” he says.

Too late: a firebomb exploded this weekend as his book was called racist and “repulsive” by the novelist Robert Harris, who compared passages in the book about Africa to the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley’s depiction of blacks in London in the Fifties.

Naipaul is used to emotive flak and wryly notes that this burst of high moral criticism has come from a best-selling author who had recently jumped to the defence of a man America was attempting to extradite for having sex with a 13-year-old. (Roman Polanski is the director of the film version of Harris’s novel, The Ghost.)

For this book Naipaul travelled intermittently in Africa for six months with the aim of finding out what the people believed in, and the resulting picture of the continent’s spiritual identity certainly has elements that are controversial: child sacrifice, witchcraft, primitive magic and trickery. There is also an encounter with Winnie Mandela, who gives her outspoken views on the weaknesses, errors and decline of her former husband Nelson post-apartheid.

Essentially the book is Naipaul’s idiosyncratic search for Africa’s spiritual core.

Continued at The Evening Standard | More Chronicle & Notices.