I would take poison rather than do this for a living,” said VS Naipaul after teaching a creative-writing course to American students who divided into those who thought him by far the most brilliant teacher on campus and those for whom he was a bigot (“He was simply the worst, most closed-minded, inconsiderate, uninteresting and incompetent professor I have ever met”).

Over the past 50 years, the London literary world has been split along similar lines. For a reclusive literary ascetic with patrician attitudes and a Miltonic sense of destiny, Naipaul has maintained a consistently high gossip quotient, trading public provocation and personal insults, pursuing and pursued to this day by private vendettas vigorously conducted in print with ex-friends and once faithful supporters.

His strange character and stranger career, coupled with rumours about his triangular private life, mystified people who knew him almost as much as people who didn’t.

Naipaul and his English wife met as fellow undergraduates at Oxford, married almost at once and dedicated themselves ever after exclusively to his writing. Patricia Hale gave up everything— her family, her future, her faith in herself— to marry a scholarship boy with no prospects, contacts or money at a time when the racial prejudice endemic at every level of British society prevented him getting a job.

Naipaul’s uncles in Trinidad were ‘Hindi-speaking cane-cutters’. His grandfather had been shipped out of India as indentured labour (‘slavery with an expiry date’, as Patrick French puts it). In the half century after he landed in England, Naipaul rose up the ranks of wealth, fame to collect every available worldly honour, including a knighthood and the Nobel Prize.

His wife understood from the start both the scale of her husband’s ambition and the punitive price to be paid in human terms. Her world contracted as his expanded. He undermined her confidence, derided her opinions and told her she was too dull to take to parties.

Blatant long-term infidelity proved easier to endure than Naipaul’s public announcement, printed in the New Yorker in 1994 and reprinted in headlines around the world, that he had regularly paid prostitutes for sex in the early years of his marriage. The shock of this revelation devastated Patricia Naipaul, who had been in remission from a cancer that now became terminal. “It could be said that I killed her”, her husband conceded dispassionately to his biographer in one of the brutally frank interviews that provide the backbone of this extraordinary book.

But on another level, this book tells a different story. The young Naipaul notoriously dismissed the achievements of better-known contemporaries still working in the great 19th Century tradition of the European novel for the same reason that artists like Matisse and Picasso struggled at the start of the last century to overthrow the canons of Western Renaissance art.

The World Is What It Is must have taken nerves of iron to write. Its clarity, honesty, panoramic range and close emotional focus, above all its virtually unprecedented access to the dark secret life at its heart, make it a most gripping biography.