In honour of the sad & recent death of V.S. Naipul, I've just read his early comic masterpiece The Mystic Masseur. Highly recommended indeed, and perhaps surprisingly it helps to really understand the nature of Jane Austen. Alternating narrative passages in gammatically correct English prose with assured dialogues of the patois and jargon of 2nd and 3rd generation Trinadaians of Indian heritage, Naipul guides the reader to a truly enriched depiction of the deceptively simple social patterns of Caribbean island life. It doesn't take long to pick up the patterns.

Some of the humour is inescapable, wisely embedded in the very essence of characters at once recognisable and over-the-top. Other laughs are more subtle, such as an authoritative declaration of a character's having received his university degree from "Oxford University, London, England."

The Austen evocation is strongest in Naipul's handling of social convention which is at once an accurate account of class expectation and a biting satire on it. There are no easy parallels, but this is the eponymous tale of the highly contradictory character of poor boy Ganesh, whose inner battles result in mostly self-deluded choices. He contrives by mysterious means to disguise his ambitions, ascribing any life successes to fate and/or God's will.

As you follow his journey, which ultimately places him at precisely the opposite of his alleged self-effacing staging posts, it's Naipul's clever crafting that releases the hilarity. It's not a perfect novel - Naipul is far too keen to use his female characters as fillers and even ciphers, unlike the greater exploration of the main males of the story.

Social satire has never been an easy genre, but Naipul shows with The Mystic Masseur that he nailed it early on.