TRINIDAD, which is the setting of the book, was inhabited by the Carib and Arawak people long before Christopher Columbus arrived although the recorded history of Trinidad and Tobago begins with the settlements of the islands by the Spanish.
Both islands were encountered by Christopher Columbus on his third voyage in 1498. Tobago changed hands between the British, French, Dutch and Courlanders, and eventually ended up in British hands.
Trinidad remained in Spanish hands until 1797, but it was largely settled by French colonists. In 1889 the two islands were incorporated into a single crown colony.
Trinidad and Tobago obtained self-governance in 1958 and independence from the British Empire in 1962.
It became a republic in 1976. This background demonstrates why the issues of identity and alienation prominent in the literary works on the islands, Miguel Street included.
The whole narrative structure is confined in a street around the western Port of Spain, which is much like a microscope of Trinidad during wartime, filled with a lively hybrid atmosphere of a multicultural neighbourhood.
Every character within the story is more or less representing a type of ordinary mass or belonging to a particular group of people.
The fact that the street is the focal point of reference is instructive. When you find yourself identified by a “street”, then you know you have certainly lost rootedness. You have no culture to speak of except the culture of the street.
On the other hand you may want to see the street as a unifying and defining centre where all the shades of the Trinidadian character.
It has become a microcosm of the West Indian postcolonial reality, including the pathetic history, experience, character and attitude.
As pointed out last week, Miguel Street, is a huge experiment with the fusion of genres. Some describe it as an anthology of short stories sharing a common narrator. For others because the various characters reappear in different stories, which all share the same boy narrator, the book can be seen as a type of novel. Yet others view it as a quasi-autobiography.
Thematically, it is a story of shattered hopes and dreams. Some of the characters appear to be affected by a kind of paralysis, for example Mr Popo the carpenter, who never finishes making anything, and the poet B Wordsworth, who is working on the greatest poem ever written but has never written past the first line.
Every major character in the book either fails to achieve their life’s dream or succeeds only to the mildest degree. In fact many go insane.
The novel is full of tragedy which is however typically understated.
Anyone who reads the stories empathetically feels the poignancy of forced tragedy although the tragic realities are sporadically interspersed with highly comedic elements. These are not ‘laugh out loud’ sorts of moments but instead light-hearted portraits of a particular time and place.
The narrative structure of the novel demonstrates unmistakable narrative genius on the part of the author. You cannot fail to recognise this even in the wake of debilitating fragments of despair churned out by each story.
Miguel Street is one rare anthology where the narrator appears in every story. The narrator, however, escapes from Miguel Street at the end of the book.
Other characters include Bogart (named after Humphrey Bogart), Hat, George, Elias, an assiduous boy, Man-man, Eddoes, a junk king, Mrs Hereira, Uncle Bhakcu, Bolo, and Edward.
The whole story is separated in 17 disconnected episodes, each one starting a new beginning and a temporary end focusing on one major character.
The story is written primarily in the first person, with each character getting his or her own chapter; the narrator’s experiences woven in-between.
All the episodes are spoken and observed by the boy-narrator who lives in Miguel Street and knows all the people well within the story as typical of any omniscient narrator.
As pointed out earlier all the endeavours of the character end in futility save the last episode where the boy-narrator himself leaves Miguel Street with the hope of making a better future.
The English being used by the major characters in the story is quite literarily broken. Naipaul seems to give his characters to grammatical mistakes to imply that this lot is far from sophistication and civilisation.
Broken English is clearly a colonial world’s symptom. Their lifestyles are devoid of any serious ambition.
They come across more as caricatures or comical cartoons. The reader is not inspired to take any one of them seriously.
Rather one is persuaded to share either the author’s cynicism or take all these characters for comic relief against the drudgeries and demands of everyday life.
The men on Miguel Street have a very relaxed attitude with regard to work and a very active one pertaining to play.  
They are portrayed as having little to no ambition. For most, life is predominantly spent in leisure activities.  
Bogart is a prime example of this. He is called Patience “…because he played that game from morn till night.”
Although there is the allusion of work because of a sign outside his house, his identity is not marked by work but by play.
He is not known for his skill as a tailor as the narrator observes, “He made pretence of making a living by tailoring… I cannot remember him making a suit.”
These sentiments of play hard and work hardly are echoed throughout the chapter and the rest of the novel as the process of gender socialisation evolves.
Much of Naipaul’s fiction has been concerned with the disintegration and discontinuities of the Indo-Trinidadian community, the foundations of which have conditioned their entry into modernity that have been determined by the creation, conscripting and looting of surplus labour, and enters a new phase with the advance of capitalist modernisation. Selwyn Cudjoe has been one of the better readers in situating Naipaul’s early work within this framework.
He writes of the prevailing predicament of their social being: “It was as though their social existence was not synchronised with the socio-political realities of their new environment”.
As a result this being is displaced and “becomes frozen between two points of existence”. But while Naipaul’s exploration of the social and psychological condition of Indian-Trinidadians may be more sensitive and layered — it is impossible to apply these observations to the Caribbean in general, given the dominance of crushing pessimism.
The next instalments will demonstrate how Naipaul loads his characters with unbearable scorn and disdain.