A glimpse of Nailpaul's greatness in one of his stories

V.S. Naipaul's 2nd story collection, A Flag on an Island, in the Everyman edition of Collected Short Fiction, includes two types of stories: from the 1950s, even one for 1950 when Naipaul was about 18, that were not included for one reason or another in Miguel Street, and post-Miguel Street stories from the 1960s. The latter are the better, as you might hope and expect. In the 1960s stories, Naipaul is developing a narrative voice, or, put another way, the narrator becomes a significant figure in the stories; in the earlier stories, the narrator was just an observer and had no personality and no role in the plot. One of the best Naipaul stories up to this point in his career is the Christmas Story, in which a hapless narrator, a devout Hindi who converts to Presbyterianism and takes a job (his father-in-law gets him the work) as a school inspector: he's a very tortured man, torn by his new identity, by the sense that he has abandoned his ethnic origins, shame about his past and about his family, but also the sense that his is not accepted and never will be accepted in the white/Christian island (Trinidad) culture. Ultimately, he gets in way over his head on a school-construction project - we get the sense that there's a lot of corruption in building costs involved, but the narrator never says this directly and may not even be aware that he's a tool - and the narrator, Randolph (his Xtian name) comes up with a scheme to destroy the building through arson. In his weasel-y way, he of course hires some others - schoolchildren maybe? - to do the deed, and things don't work out as he planned. This narrator is an precursor to an Ishigura narrator, particularly in remains of the day: he's cool and rational, and doesn't realize apparently all of the evil around him, the evil that he himself perpetuates: his willingness, even eagerness, to thrash schoolchildren for their own good, for example. This story also takes on directly the theme of a clash of cultures and identities - the great Naipaul themes - which are left mostly unexamined in the earlier stories that focus only on the small Indian-Trinidad community in which Naipaul grew up: the earliest stories don't give a sense that Naipaul would become any more than a regional writer, but the later stories show glimpses of the great world writer he would become.