Book of a Lifetime: The Enigma of Arrival, By VS Naipaul

Ten years ago I had the good luck to spend a couple of days in the company of VS Naipaul, when we were both involved in some literary shenanigan in Italy. He was charming, elegant and avuncular; for his Italian minders, however, he must have been something of a nightmare. Speeches were being made in his honour: long, deeply felt orations in sonorous Italian. He made no attempt to hide his impatience. Later, at a prize-giving ceremony, Naipaul was to receive a lifetime achievement award. For the climactic moment the microphone was passed to a young woman, perhaps a local ex-beauty queen. On stage, she asked Naipaul, in faltering English, to tell "us" about his books. It looked for an instant as though he might shove her into the laps of the front row but after a grimace of exasperation, and some peevish flapping of his hands, he said he was interested in the idea of somebody – of getting what someone's idea might be of himself.

It's a way of looking very evident in Naipaul's wonderful 1987 novel, The Enigma of Arrival. This is the story of a man – a writer from Trinidad – who goes to live, as Naipaul did, in a secluded valley in Wiltshire. It's an autobiographical novel then, or autobiography distanced and subtly defused by the words "a novel" printed on the title page. What excited me about this book was the way a landscape I knew very well was shown to me in a new, meticulous and entirely convincing way. He walks, he takes the bus, he has the occasional conversation, he listens, he misses little. This is a view of a quintessentially English scene presented by a man enamoured with what he sees, but never able to overcome his "stranger's nerves". In some ways it's reminiscent of a later writer, WG Sebald, in a book like The Rings of Saturn – the same alertness, the well-stocked literary intelligence, the hypersensitivity. About the private life of the narrator – let's call him Naipaul – we learn very little in a direct sense. At one point he becomes ill but the illness, evidently serious, is dismissed in a few lines.

He has some visitors, but very few. The book's "characters" are the neighbours he sees on his circuits, people whose lives his own very faintly impinges upon: a farm worker, Jack, whose manliness and industry Naipaul clearly admires; the reclusive, aristocratic landlord; the well-dressed gardener with the beautiful wife. There are little scandals, even a crime of passion. People leave, new people come, move into the old houses. From the start the atmosphere is profoundly elegiac. Everyone – the valley itself – is subject to the same immutable law of decay. The narrator, however, is not in opposition to this; indeed, it perfectly suits that sensibility of his which is the book's true target. And so he patrols his exile's refuge, his temporary Eden, with a sober, fatalistic love of the place, a quiet sense of his good fortune in finding it at all.

Andrew Miller's 'One Morning Like a Bird' is published by Sceptre