Naipaul is recognised as a "magnificent novelist",[9] and A Bend in the River has been described as a "full-bodied masterpiece".[10] Yet he has been accused of being a "neo-colonialist",[9] and in this novel post-colonial Africa is depicted as spiralling into a kind of Hell. He has also been accused of being "infected by an ancestral communal resentment" against blacks.[9] Jennifer Seymour Whitaker indicates that Salim's plight as an outsider, a member of the Indian community in Africa, is credibly rendered, but takes Naipaul to task for ascribing to African people a "mysterious malevolence".[11]
Irving Howe admires Naipaul's "almost Conradian gift for tensing a story", the psychic and moral tension of the novel, and its "serious involvement with human issues".[12] Howe rejects the notion that Naipaul is an apologist of colonialism. He contrasts the foreground space occupied by Salim with the background acts set in motion by the Big Man. The Big Man never appears but finds a voice in Raymond, the white intellectual whom the President promotes but later ignores. Howe bemoans the fact that, as he sees it, Naipaul allows "the wretchedness of his depicted scene" to become "the limit of his vision".[12]
Selwyn Cudjoe thinks that the novel depicts "the gradual darkening of African society as it returns to its age-old condition of bush and blood"[13] and thinks this pessimistic view indicates Naipaul's "inability to examine postcolonial societies in any depth".[13] The novel examines "the homeless condition of the East Indian in a world he cannot call home" and shows in Salim's case his passage to free himself from "the constricting ties to his society's past".[13]
Imraan Coovadia examines Naipaul's Latin quotations, accuses him of misquotation and manipulation, and suggests that he tries to evoke fear, disgust and condescension.[14] Massod Raja suggests that the novel takes an essentially bourgeois perspective, Salim being interested, not in revolutionary goals, but in maintaining a profitable enterprise.[15] He asserts that Naipaul is not a postcolonial author but a "cosmopolitan" one (as defined by Timothy Brennan), who offers an "inside view of formerly submerged peoples" for target audiences that have "metropolitan literary tastes".[15]
In 2001, without specifically referring to this novel, the Nobel Literature Prize Committee indicated that it viewed Naipaul as Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings.[16] In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad presented a dark picture of the same region at the beginning of European colonization; this type of depiction of Africa is also found recast in Naipaul's novel.[13][15]
Like Conrad, who in Heart of Darkness does not name the big river, Naipaul does not name the river in this novel, nor the town at its bend, nor the country or its president. Yet there are possible identifiers. Thus the reader learns that the town is located in the heart of Africa, at the end of the navigable river, just below the cataracts, and the European colonisers had been French-speaking, perhaps Belgians. Naipaul's description has been interpreted to point to the town of Kisangani on the Congo river.[17][18] A link between the "Big Man" and President Mobutu of Zaire was drawn by some reviewers.[11][14] Naipaul credits his extramarital affair with Margaret Gooding for giving A Bend in the River and his later books greater fluidity, saying that these "in a way to some extent depend on her. They stopped being dry.”[10]
