A journey to London and the enigmatic nature of arrival in Naipaul's novel

The second section of V.S. Naipaul's 1988 novel, The Enigma of Arrival, is "The Journey," which is accurate enough; the narrator describes his travel from his homeland, Trinidad, through NYC to London (and later to Oxford) where he will study on a scholarship. He in fact won a highly competitive scholarship, and he is pretty much the only person from his family or from his community - Asian/Indians who settled in Trinidad and now mostly run shops and small business enterprises - to travel abroad, much less to England to study, mush less to study to become a writer. Obviously the fact-details so closely match what we know of VSN's life that this might as well be considered a memoir; if there are elements here that have nothing to do w/ VSN's life, that's too bad because I think most readers will never make that distinction and these fictive elements have now become part of what we "know" about VSN's early life. He does a terrific job recounting not only the feelings and emotions attendant on his first days in London - a mixture of awe, pride, anguish, loneliness - but also the status and surface details of life in London in the 50s and 60s: the look and feel of the cheap boarding house, dark, with dusty and "cockroachy" odors, the old Metro stations w/ their decommissioned vending machines, the strange site of the bombed-out ruins of some houses and buildings right in the middle of a neighborhood or block untouched, the Dickensian expectations - for how else would he have known London other than through that lens, and isn't that true of all Americans who traveled there up through the 60s (when TV and movies and now streaming video give us plenty of images on life in London). He also gives us insight into the subtle or not-so-subtle racism he encountered: the bursar on the ocean liner who put him in a single berth and then tried to put another passenger - a black American - in the berth, a man who immediately saw through the ploy; the cold reception at a social club, the dreary isolation and loneliness in the rooming house. Seeing himself as a writer, he thinks about a story he will work on - focused on a night watchman aboard the ocean liner (a good idea, actually); the story gets nowhere, but he obviously remembers his journey in intimate detail, which he is mining successfully now, 20+ years later - which may be part of the enigmatic nature of arrival.