A Morris can and will write about everywhere, much as an interviewer may summon someone to her room and assess her expertly within a few minutes; a Naipaul returns over and over to the same few places, and they are always the places that he feels can unlock one particular aspect of his circumstance — in his case, the attempt to find a voice after a colonial upbringing, how truly to come upon a state of independence....
When Morris brought out a sort of greatest-hits collection — an anthology of a lifetime’s voyagings — a few years ago ... it suddenly became intriguing to see the two master travelers together. Her title, in its original British edition, “A Writer’s World,” strikingly echoed the title given to a collection of Naipaul’s travel essays, a few months before, “The Writer and the World,” and in the gap between that apostrophe and the “and” (one an act of possession, of claiming, the other of an austere separation, a distance that seemed incurable), it seemed that one could see exactly who each one of them was, and all the distance between them.
— Pico Iyer, insightfully comparing the near-contemporary writer-travellers Jan Morris and V.S. Naipaul on WorldHum. (Am having delicious visions of a novel in which characters closely based on these two writers find themselves stranded together in some remote and vaguely hostile location and must form an alliance to battle their way back to civilisation, etc. Or maybe it would work better as an action-adventure movie, complete with Land Rover chases through burning deserts, rescues from snake pits, and a climactic fight scene. I can imagine the Jan Morris character expertly flicking a rapier and cracking witticisms, while the Naipaul character dourly swings an improvised club — say, a table leg.)
