Migrants and migrant writers in English literature

In September 2015, Europeans were gripped by the image of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old from Syria, who drowned on a beach in Turkey as his father tried to bring him to Europe. The family members were hoping to reach Canada, or what we used to refer to as the New World. There's nothing make-believe about the millions of people moving around on the margins of Europe at the moment: it's a global crisis with consequences for people who attempt the crossing and communities who agree to take them in, ifthey achieve landfall and make a successful case for asylum.

In novels, and other kinds of make-believe, the journey brings together the most compelling elements of narrative --• adventure, a sense of mission, the imminent threat of catastrophe - and reconfigures descriptive writing as cinema. But the device of the journey succeeds best when characters reach the objective that a novelist has in mind for them. Imagine ploughing through the 'Eumaeus' episode (episode 16) in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), without Leopold Bloom's return to

Ithaca, at 7 Eccles Street, Dublin, and his rediscovery of Penelope. Imagine Marlow forging up the Congo River in Heart of Darkness (1899) without finding Mr Kurtz.

Any number of good novelists can dispense with the voyage, the passage on the high seas, the upriver journey, the perilous excursion into unfamiliar places. In Madame Bovary, the journey by carriage from the village of Tostes to the provincial town of Yonville, and the bustle of arrival, are beautifully handled, but Flaubert is chiefly concerned to get his characters off the coach and watch them develop, for better or worse, in their destination. A note about the real world here: restrictive immigration policies seldom discourage human beings from embarking on dangerous journeys, but many migrants who attempt the voyage are forbidden a destination in prosperous countries. Where destination is denied, the journey cannot really come to an end, as it does in fiction. This is a kind of hell.

A handful of migrants appear in 18^th and 19^th-century English fiction. Mostly they're forced to emigrate away from Europe. The New World is already an alluring horizon for writers by the time Daniel Defoe packs Moll Flanders off to the colonies on the east coast of the Americas: to Maryland and Virginia¹. Moll's mother was sent there earlier: both mother and daughter are convicts. We're given hints of a colonial topos in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1811): Sir Thomas Bertram, the head of the household in Northamptonshire, is absent for much of the novel on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean. Bertram is in no sense an emigre, but he's become identified in postcolonial studies with the existence of another, far-off world from which wealth is extracted for the edification of impressive gentlemen's estates in Britain: the same world from which colonial subjects, in the form of migrant West Indians, will appear in Britain as a labour force a century and a half later. In 19^th-century literature, the New World is not always a welcoming place for stalwart migrants. Dickens abandons Martin Chuzzlewit and his cheerful companion Mark Tapley in

' The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders was published in 1722.

an American swamp, where Martin's attempt to found a settlement nearly kills him.2

But what of the character who moves from an outside to an inside, from a colonial outpost or a 'barbarian' wasteland to the heart of civilisation? This is the journey Charlotte Bronte assigns to Bertha Mason, the first Mrs Rochester, in Jane Eyre (1847). She's a creole, a white West Indian, brought to the mother country only to come to a bad end in the attic of a gloomy, isolated mansion somewhere in the chilly north. But it's not simply because Bertha Mason3 is a passionate woman -a monster woman - that she's confined:  it's also to do with the fact that she's tainted with the  low culture  of the Caribbean islands - an outsider by association with the races that her own expatriate class were in the New World to dominate. Until she sets fire to Thornfield Hall, Mrs Rochester's wildness is kept under lock and key, but a novelist can also choose to give the dangerous outsider a free rein, which is the decision Emily Bronte took, with Wuthering Heights, published the same year as Jane Eyre.

Heathcliff is probably the founding immigrant of Victorian fiction. Old Mr Earnshaw finds him on the streets of Liverpool, the port-city second only to London in the imperial homeland, where goods and persons from around the empire are entering and leaving. We can't tell where he's from. Perhaps he's Irish: Ireland had been colonised from the 16^th century onwards and the critic Terry Eagleton⁴ thinks he might be a precursor of the Irish refugees - we should call them hunger refugees -- who began to arrive in Liverpool towards the end of 1845: by the time Wuthering Heights was published there were 300,000 Irish refugees in the port of Liverpool, as a result of the famine.

Heathcliff is 'dirty, ragged, black-haired'; which could well mean Irish. His complexion seems dark, he is regarded as a 'gypsy'. Edgar Linton's father wonders if he might be 'an American or Spanish castaway', or 'a little Lascar': lascars were seamen of Indian, Malayan, Yemeni or other extraction. These are racial descriptions of Heathcliff, founded on ideas about the foreign migrant which are also typical of later reactions - not just in literature -as the curtain came down on Britain's empire. He is an object of resentment, and anxiety. He is also an enchanter, who seems to cast a spell on Catherine. He takes advantage of the weakness of others; he is excessive in most things, the exceptions being kindness and alcohol abuse. He is greatly to be feared and impossible to tame. To put it another way, his capacity to assimilate, which is striking in many ways -- remains illusory: it is not to be trusted.

We'll come across his descendants in 20^th-century fiction in a moment (they'll speak in their own voices), but first we need to think about another group of migrants, who preoccupied the English for centuries and entered Britain in large numbers from the early 1880s onwards - that's to say 30 years after Wuthering Heights was written.

The appearance of the Jew in English literature predates the first wave of the diaspora, moving westward from Russia and eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century, and until recently I'd never understood the role assigned to Jewish characters in fiction as the role of 'migrant'. It's true that we can say in a highly generalised way where we think a Jewish person is 'from', but this 'from-ness' is oddly irrelevant. The Jewish person in literature transcends his place of origin, and his point of entry into the host culture: it's as though he or she had always been around. He is - and perhaps always was -- 'among us' without being 'one of us'. But it turns out, in the end, that Jews are as bothersome - and 'othersome' - to the host imagination as other migrants.

The reason we can't see this in the first instance is that the Jewish character doesn't stand out unless a work of fiction points up his distinctiveness. This is the case with Fagin in Oliver Twist(1837), whom we know to be Jewish because he's insistently referred to as 'a Jew' or 'the Jew', in a process of naming, and reiterating, which drives home the difference between the impresario and his galaxy of petty criminals. This is not the same as referring to Othello as 'the Moor': we know Othello is black; the fact does not require constant signalling. Fagin, however, is too deeply entangled with London, and the London underworld, to be much more than a low denizen of a low city. His outsider status is hard to spot: so hard, indeed, that you might want to think of him as 'assimilated'.  But if you didn't believe in assimilation - if you were an essentialist -you'd simply repeat that he was a Jew, in the same way that extreme right-wing ideologues in Europe  say over and over about assimilated migrants that there's nothing European about them and never will be.5

So perhaps you see my reluctance, in my first encounter with this question, to put the Jews in fiction under the general heading 'immigrants'. Heathcliff is visibly and actively at odds with his host society - his passionate antagonism couldn't be clearer - even though he masters its habits, and its laws of heredity, learning the arts of wealth transfer in the process.

Nevertheless the Jew is as exotic, and as dubious, as any incomer. And he doesn't need to be an underworld figure like

Fagin to  draw down  suspicion.  Take the  case  of Augustus

Melmotte, a villain of the boardroom, in The Way We Live Now (1875) by Anthony Trollope. We're never told that Melmotte is Jewish, only that his wife is. Yet a strong inflection of character - almost caricature - endows him with the moral likeness of the subversive Jew. Melmotte could be from anywhere; it's even been suggested that he is American Irish. What matters is that he is not English: he is a foreign profiteer who makes the most of a moment in which the city of London's taste for speculative investment has grown out of control.  But why is Melmotte's way of playing the game so unacceptable? After all, he can't rob and deceive unless he can find complicit dupes in the form of Englishmen who share his low ambitions. He is an intrusive influence from the outside who brings out the worst in a race of heroes and gentlemen. That is as much evidence as we need to suspect that he may be a Jew (though Trollope, as far as I know, was not an anti-Semitic novelist).

The quiet emphasis in Daniel Deronda is on acknowledging distinct needs and aspirations, and it could almost be a forerunner of multiculturalism, except of course that these differences will be enacted in separate parts of the world. Jewishness requires a national identity, and a national identity requires a national homeland. And so the two 'peoples' are bound to separate, arresting the process of assimilation in order to live apart, not for the purity of the host country - Daniel Deronda is not about a Jewish 'threat' -- but for the good of the Jews. The Holy Land beckons: in Palestine Jews will rediscover - or invent -- their roots, their rituals, their vigour, their capacity to ground a history and drive it into position with a written tradition and a landscape. Much later, they will have a state sanctioned by international consensus and military conquest.

So how does this racial destiny unfold in the novel? When - and only when - Daniel discovers his Jewish mother, he is free to embrace the Zionist dream, marry a Jew, and take ship for Palestine. The separation between Daniel and Gwendolen Harleth, his free-spirited English beauty, is decisive: it's a racialised parting, and a triumphant act of segregation, yet Daniel has moved to the next square only by contriving to look over his shoulder at his people's past. The difficulty about the novel, it seems to me, is that England may well turn out to be a dreary place without the Jews. In some sense, poor Gwendolen, who loves Daniel to death, is really no more than an English version of Lot's wife. She can't follow her loved one out of Sodom and Gomorrah - Sodom actually -- but she's transformed into a pillar of salt in any case. Not because she turns around: on the contrary, she wishes him well and watches him on his way. It's Daniel who transforms her by his own turning around - and back - to his Jewishness. Whenever we ask where we came from, the risk we take in complex, heterogeneous societies is that social relations will be reduced to a heap of salt.

By the early 20th century, in the high experimental Modernism of the iconoclasts - Joyce, Pound, Eliot - the story of the outsider who's also very much on the inside can be told in a powerful shorthand. In Eliot and Pound the fascination with the Jew becomes a lavish anti-Semitism, driven by fatal notions of purity and a sense of conspiracy: if Eliot and Pound could have invented a doctors' plot, they would have done so. The motherland that Eliot wished to shield from the perversity of the Jews was not the Soviet Union, but a version of Christian tradition: the rarefied world of Anglican Christianity. Pound's illusions were much grander: he took up the role of bossy chaperone - you can almost see the parasol and the veiled hat -with the idea of protecting the grandeur of European art and civilization from unwholesome predators. He also imagined that art was radically threatened by the habit of charging interest on a loan. By and large Pound kept his anti-Semitism out of his poetry: the obvious exceptions are Cantos 35 and 52. But he spread it like chaff in his discourse, especially his fascist broadcasts in Italy, before his detention by the Americans in 1945. Eliot was a far more considered anti-Semite:

On the Rialto once.

The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot.

('Burbank with a Baedecker: Bleistein with a Cigar', Poems, 1920)

James Joyce took an entirely different, more fruitful interest in the outsider/insider, by inventing a migrant who belongs unequivocally to the city he lives in, even ifothers disagree with him on this point. The city is Dublin, the book is Ulysses, and strictly speaking this is Irish not English literature, though Joyce's novel is among the greatest in the English language. I say 'migrant' but Leopold Bloom is not a first-generation Jewish newcomer in Ireland. He is an assimilated Dubliner, whose origins are Jewish, yet scarcely to the point. His father has converted to Protestantism before his birth and his mother, Fanny Hegarty, is Irish, although we know her father's name was Karoly: she, too, has an outsider pedigree.

The difficulty about Bloom's belonging is that in 1904, the year the novel in which the novel is set, Dublin was neither a sophisticated nor a properly cosmopolitan city - by cosmopolitan I mean international - and it wasn't clear to the indigenous Irish that Bloom was entitled to be a bona fide Dubliner. Waves of Jewish persecution in the east - especially after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 - forced millions of Jews to move away, and in 1901 - three years before Bloom leaves his house in Eccles Street to buy a pig's kidney for breakfast - there were nearly 4000 Jews in Ireland. It was not a momentous intake: fewer than 0.08 per cent of the population. Dublin's Jews would have been conspicuous in the eyes oftheir fellow townspeople, even if - like Bloom - they regarded themselves as fully assimilated. Bloom's subjectivity - his thoughts, his feelings, the performance of his bodily functions as he apprehends them - is almost overwhelming, yet whatever he knows about his Irishness, he has the objective character of an intruder in the eyes of others.

Joyce weaves the theme of anti-Semitism through the book for several reasons. One key purpose is to signal the provincialism of his fellow Irish. A second is to point up the irony of a people who feel disparaged by the British disparaging the Jews. Bloom seems to carry the curse of nationalism - all nationalisms - around with him in the city. As a consequence, we see him as a wanderer in peril, like Odysseus, in a landscape, which - unlike Odysseus - he knows so well. The sharpest encounter in the novel, a confrontation between the natives and the intruder, occurs in the 'Cyclops' episode (episode 12), where Bloom encounters a bigot known as The Citizen. The setting is a bar, Barny Kiernan's, where the clientele have had too much to drink. Every time Bloom opens his mouth, he gets into deeper trouble. Here is an abridged extract:

Persecution, says Bloom, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations.

• -    But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.

• -    Yes, says Bloom.

• -    What is it? says John Wyse. (Wyse is one of the Citizen's cronies.)

• -    A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place . . .

• - What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen.

• -    Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.

As matters degenerate at Barney Kiernan's, the Citizen - a staunch Fenian, radically anti-British, turns on Bloom and insults him with 'Three cheers for Israel!' As Bloom leaves, and tempers get heated, he replies:

'Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and

Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.'

'By Jesus,' says the Citizen, 'I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.'

He seizes a biscuit tin, waddles through the door and flings it at Bloom, but Bloom is already heading away in a horsedrawn cab and the tin goes wide of the mark. The city has spurned the man who inhabits it more deeply, more selfconsciously, than any of his adversaries. He protests, survives the consequences, and - like Odysseus - pursues his wayward journey to his destination.6

Across the Irish Sea, England was approaching a moment when the size of immigrant intakes would reshape the national sensibility. There were many kinds of Odysseus, including a new wave of Irish migrants, which began in the  1930s, but it wasn't until the end of World War Two that Britain saw a substantial intake of human beings from remote parts of the world.

An extraordinary passage about coming to London can be found in V.S. Naipaul's retrospective, autobiographical novel, The Enigma of Arrival (1987). The author - not the book, the author - is an unmistakable creation of the British empire. He is the result of an exodus of Asians, in the  19th century, from the vast plain of the Ganges River in what is now northern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh: people who journeyed by sea around the Cape and up to the Caribbean, where the British set them to work on sugar plantations, after the abolition of slavery. Naipaul's identity as an imperial subject - even as empire fades - has historical depth. In the novel, he is a hungry, ambitious figure who wants to make his mark in the metropolitan capital.

He knows that London is the place to be, the destination of choice for a writer who grew up in one of Britain's distant possessions. Here is how he describes the city at the time of his arrival:

. . . in 1950 in London I was at the beginning of that great movement ofpeoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century - . . . Cities like London were to change. They were to cease being more or less national cities; they were to become cities of the world . . . establishing the pattern of what great cities should be, in the eyes of islanders like myself and people even more remote in language and culture. They were to be cities visited for learning and elegant goods and manners and freedom by all the barbarian peoples of the globe, people of forest and desert, Arabs, Africans and Malays.

The word 'barbarian' is carefully chosen to describe the immigrants who had begun to arrive at the same time as he did. It's a way of saying: 'I, Naipaul, am not what you take me for, but I plan to be a great British writer, and I'll soon stand out from the crowd of post-imperial peoples that inhabit your magnificent city.' It is typical of Naipaul's disdain for political correctness - and his haughty contempt for solidarity of any kind - that he should look down on other immigrants who lack his own education and sense of destiny. Naipaul was right about himself: he was honoured by the Queen, won a Nobel Prize for literature and now has more than 30 books to his name.

Other immigrants coming to Britain from the Caribbean were not as 'barbarian' or inarticulate as you'd imagine from Naipaul's passage about the new postwar influx. They may not have had the same good fortune, or the same class status as he enjoyed: most were finding work in factories or the public sector, and of those, many were underpaid. They were victims of race prejudice - colour prejudice - but they, too, had voices, and often they spoke of disillusion and estrangement from their new environment in an idiom very different from Naipaul's.

The novelist George Lamming arrived in Britain in 1950. He was another Caribbean writer, from Barbados. Like Naipaul - who came from Trinidad - he was well-educated, but in one of his great novels, The Emigrants (1954), he chose to explore the lives of first-generation migrant workers leaving their homes and settling uneasily in London. Here he describes the boredom, homesickness and claustrophobia of a group of migrants in their hostel at the end of a day's work:

The day had followed the pattern which other days had rehearsed. [The hostel occupants] had worked, returned home, and now in the early night which had suddenly grown thick outside they were together in a small room which offered no protection from the threat of boredom. It was so easy to feel the emptiness of being awake with no activity . . . In another climate, at another time, they would ramble the streets, yarning and singing, or sit at the street corners throwing dice as they taked aimlessly abut everything and nothing. Life was leisurely. But this room was different. Its immediacy forced them to see that each was caught in it. There was no escape from it until the morning came with its uncertain offer of another day's work. Alone, circumscribed by the night and the neutral staring walls, each felt himself pushed to the limits of his thinking. All life became an immediate situation from which action was the only escape. And their action was limited to the labour of a casual hand in a London factory. It was here in the room of garlic, onions and mist that each became aware, gradually, anxiously, of the level and scope of his private existence.

Private, individual, lonely lives: this is one of Lamming's points migration: it involved a shift in conscioousness away from the old sense of community towards the unit of the single self.

Contemporary British migrant voices, which begin with Salman Rushdie - the voices we've been hearing for 25 years or more - are very different. They're brimming with confidence. The dark days of isolation and day-in-day-out racial oppression are gone: racism is still in evidence, but the brave new multicultural world is full of promise. It's a tough, ironic, perceptive literature, sure of itself and even of its own ambivalence. And 'voice' - which draws the diction of the novel from its outsider characters - is paramount. Characters speak for themselves, even when they're thinking aloud.

White, black, brown, hybrid, Christian, agnostic, Muslim, scientific materialist. This is how London looks in Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth (2000). Smith's city is a globalised mix of people and races. It's also a laboratory where we can examine what happens when empires -the British empire, for example - rise and fall, and subject-peoples become both real people and speaking, thinking subjects, making a way for themselves in the metropolitan centre.

The neighbours have made an impression on Majid, one of Alsana's twin sons. Majid is intrigued by the work of the father, a geneticist, who experiments on mice. 'These people are taking my son away from me!' Alsana explains to friends and relatives about her neighbours. 'They're Englishyfing him completely! They're deliberately leading him away from his culture and his family and his religion.' 'Englishified' children are a source of pain and perplexity for migrant parents hoping to preserve a trans-generational link with the mother country.

Genetic science - the profession of the neighbours' father -is a secular practice, yet it seems at the same time to be about playing God. One of the big questions in White Teeth is about human destiny. This is why Zadie Smith decides to give her migrant characters, Samad and Alsana, identical twin sons. Majid turns out to be a fully assimilated British subject. His brother Millat becomes lost in a superficial quarrel with himself about who he really is. It's not clear how we, the readers, are supposed to think about the pain that Majid's new, spick-and-span, eurocentric, science-based secularism causes his parents, but I suspect that we're meant to see Majid's evolution as a good thing: he's suave, clever and cut out for success; this in turn testifies to the broader success of a lively, British multicultural society. White Teeth is a celebration of messy complexity.

The fictional character in a postmodern, multicultural British novel is like the actual character in a real hybrid, postcolonial culture: different identities coexist happily in the same individual: Muslim but also British, black but also British, Irish but also British, Scottish but London Scottish. Sometimes this coexistence is unhappy, or unresolved; sometimes one identity is superimposed on another. But by and large the migrant or the migrant's children make a way in their new environment. And in the long encounter with difference, the host society is supposed to undergo a healthy, liberating transformation.

In White Teeth matters are not so simple. Majid's identical twin, Millat, takes a very different course from his brother's. Majid is sent to Bangladesh to remind him of the great Asian traditions from which he sprang, but the result is only to make him more 'Englishyfied'. Millat, on the other hand, is an incorrigibly naughty English boy. He likes sex and drugs and alcohol and grasps the thrills of 1990s Anglo-Saxon consumer capitalism. Nonetheless, a strange dissatisfaction - an absence of empowerment - leads him into religious belief and he joins a militant group of British Islamists. (The novel is set around the time of the Salman Rushdie affair, and the burning of Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses by angry Muslims in Britain.)

Between them, the identical twins of second-generation migrants achieve an equilibrium that reflects the uneasiness of their parents. But the symmetry is far from perfect. Millat is divided, and plagued by conflict, like his father, Samad Iqbal: the author tells us Millat has a 'split-level' 'subconscious': I think she means 'consciousness': it's in the upper layers of Millat's self that we're able to observe the 'split'. One part, under the influence of his militant Islamist friends, is preoccupied by Islamic values: the importance of self-denial, the intellectual beauty of the Q'uran and the need to overcome the tainted nature of the West. The other part likes to drink beer and have sex.

Millat is a fan of Hollywood gangster movies and on closer inspection his Islamism turns out to be an inflection of his passion for violent occidental fantasies about winners and losers. 'If the game was God,' we're told, 'if the game was a fight against the west, against the presumptions of western science . . . he was determined to win it.' [569]. In White Teeth the Muslim family - Samad Iqbal's family - experiences a slow-motion baptism into western values: Majid opts for intelligent secularism and Millat, while appearing to succumb to Islamism, sticks fast to habits acquired in the host culture, founding his radical imagination in conventional, grand guignol movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas. Here is a curious lesson for migrants: when they imagine they are not assimilating, it turns out they are.

Monica Ali is another chronicler of migrant lives in London. Her novel Brick Lane is based in the Bangladeshi community in the east of the city. Ali herself is a first-generation immigrant, who arrived in Britain at the age of three. Brick Lane was published after the Al Qaeda attacks on the US in 2001 and lacks the free-ranging comic spirit of White Teeth, which was published before 9/11.7 Brick Lane, too, is rich in comedy, but the tone is more subdued.

Planned airstrikes on Afghanistan and hostility towards Muslims, brought on by 9/11, are what persuade the head of the family, Chanu, that it's time to go back to Bangladesh and start again. He wants to take his young wife, Nazneen, and their children. But Nazneen has been having an affair with a radicalised Muslim - a sympathiser with the Islamist brigades in Chechnya, and a more intelligent figure than Millat, the radical in White Teeth. Chanu's daughters are becoming 'westernised' or Englishyfied - he doesn't like this - and an urban drugs problem, complete with gangsterism, has hit the community. There are plenty of reasons to leave, but Nazneen and the children won't.  Part of the reason is that the home country,

Bangladesh, is so impoverished: we know this through the letters Hazneen receives from her sister, who remained at home, leading a life on the edge of destitution.

Bangladesh is always encroaching on the London setting, not as a memory but as a real place, setting up a deep, historical sense of contradiction in the novel. Something is wrong: the extent of the former British empire is vast; but in the postimperial order, only London seems to offer the infrastructure of civilisation that Britain promised to deliver to the rest of the world. Then, too, as Al Qaeda opens a fissure in another, more powerful empire, the repercussions pitch Muslims on this side of the Atlantic into a new conversation about their identity. Their inquiry leaves them with some difficult answers about their relationship with the host country.

Ali's characters are more fully self-inhabiting than Smith's, whose intellectual framework, witty and sometimes profound, requires her to  intrude on her characters'  thoughts  and steer them about in order to align them with the argument. Yet the surfaces  of both  novels  are  dazzling  and  the  texture  of subjectivity is kept alive in the exploration of family: both White Teeth and Brick Lane are grounded in family life and the interaction between parents and children. For the solitary, selfenriching subjectivity, gloriously freed from the obligations of loyalty to family and friends, we must look elsewhere - for instance to the haughty, scornful figure of V.S. Naipaul. I'm thinking again of The Enigma of Arrival, and a passage in the closing moments of the book, when the narrator - or narrator/author - is reflecting on the premature death of his sister.

Sati's funeral has brought him back to Trinidad, his birthplace. He's attended a Hindu ceremony in her honour, a short while after her cremation, and now brings a cold eye to bear on the state of his relatives. At a time of bereavement he's struck by the need, in what's become a modern, comfortable Asian-Caribbean family, for old Hindu ritual that allows them to represent their past to themselves. He understands this need, and sees at the same time how far his brother-in-law and nephew have drifted from a sense of the old religion - and how money has broken old continuities for ever.

The family had once lived, he writes, according to rituals we didn't always understand and yet were unwilling to dishonour because that would cut us off from the past, the sacred earth, the gods . . . But we couldn't surrender to them now. We had become self-aware . . . Now money had touched us all - like a branch of a tree or a twig dipped in gold, according to some designer's extravagant whim, and made to keep the shape of the twig or the leaf. Generations of a new kind of education had separated us from our past; and travel; and history.

Later he adds: 'We had made ourselves anew.'

The force of conviction - the deeply felt nature of Naipaul's reflections - is hidden by the sweep of his account: the destiny of one family is simultaneously the destiny of an ancient religion, and the tens of thousands of immigrants who took it with them from the Ganges. It's a potted history of a people, with an ambiguous moral about prosperity and self-invention. And yet it remains a personal story about a moment of ritual observance and the loss of a sister.

Where are we now? It's hard to say for sure whether the moment of confidence that begins in the postwar years, and peaks with Zadie Smith, is altogether at an end. Marina Lewycka, a novelist of Ukrainian origin, born in a refugee camp in Germany, has prolonged the occasion with her comic portrayals of eastern European migrants in the UK. She's become a popular author in the process, first with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian in 2005 and then with Two Caravans in 2007, about a diverse group of seasonal fruitpickers in the UK.

A change in the ambient noise of British life, and with it a sense of unease, makes Lewycka's books seem insufficient. It also means that the exuberance of Zadie Smith and Monica Ali is less infectious than it was when their first novels appeared around 15 years ago. Much has happened since then: the banking crash of 2008, rising inequality, the re-framing of old race issues in terms of fierce opposition to new immigrants. The contradictions of the Middle East have been sharpened by the destructive force of new colonial wars and the apocalyptic violence of jihadism. There are shadows in the room now and the playful tone of White Teeth belongs to a moment that's passing. Perhaps a new generation of British novelists descended from migrants will discover their most reliable precursor in George Lamming.