By Aravind Adiga.
Free Press. 288 pp. $24
Reviewed by Salil Tripathi
There is a fairy-tale aspect to the fortunes of Aravind Adiga's
The White Tiger
.
The Indian writer's debut novel unexpectedly won the Man Booker Prize, Britain's richest literary prize, awarded annually to a novel written in English by an author from the Commonwealth. Past winners have included V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, William Golding, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro.
At 33, Adiga is among the youngest winners in the history of the prize; in early voting he beat such prominent rivals as Rushdie and Joseph O'Neill, and in the final round Sebastian Berry, Amitav Ghosh and Philip Hensher. In India, his victory will delight just the sort of people Adiga ridicules in the novel: the middle class, which believes Indian pride is asserted by the shine of a new car and the size of a mall.
The White Tiger
is ironically promoted on an Indian TV network whose audience comprises the sort of people Adiga's protagonist, the chauffeur-turned-entrepreneur Balram Halwai, abhors.
In announcing the selection of
The White Tiger
, the jury chair and former Conservative Party politician Michael Portillo praised Adiga's portrayal of modern India's glaring contrasts, its poverty and criminal underbelly. That's an odd reason to reward fiction, especially since
The White Tiger
is neither the first nor the best in this regard. In the 1930s Mulk Raj Anand wrote
Coolie
and
Untouchable
, novels that shocked the conscience of India's chattering classes. In the 1994 novel
A Suitable Boy
, Vikram Seth took us to the poor workers in tanneries with Tolstoyan social realism. Rohinton Mistry brilliantly described urban India's migrant poor in his 1995 novel
A Fine Balance
. In the 2002 novel
The Glass Palace
, Ghosh revealed the lives of Indian plantation workers in Malaya, and in this year's
Sea of Poppies
, he takes us inside an opium factory.
The White Tiger
is an epistolary novel in which Balram writes a series of letters to the Chinese leader Wen Jiabao, who is visiting India and wants to know what makes Bangalore, one of India's fastest-growing high-tech centers, tick. Balram takes it upon himself (although Adiga never explains why) to introduce Wen to the India he won't be shown.
Balram has grown up in Bihar (referred to as Darkness throughout the novel), a mineral-rich state with terrible poverty and crime. He is from the low end of India's intricate caste hierarchy, but gets a job as a driver for the returned-from-the-United-States son of a feudal landlord. He contrives to be chosen as the chauffeur the son and his buxom wife will take with them to Delhi - more precisely, the suburban city of Gurgaon, which now exemplifies American kitsch, with its sprawling malls and high-rise apartment blocks.
Balram is disgusted by everyone around him, including other servants, and makes laconic observations, only some of which are sharp or witty. He does show karmic fatalism: When his master's wife kills a child in a hit-and-run accident after a night of hard drinking, Balram accepts his master's instruction that he protect her by taking the blame.
In his rearview mirror, Balram sees his master's marriage disintegrate, and watches him bribe politicians. In a transformation again not explained satisfactorily, Balram gets angry over time, and eventually cuts his master's throat. Balram flees to Bangalore and sets up a transport business, whose success reflects the odd success of that city itself. At Bangalore's many outsourcing firms, professional women work odd hours, including frequent late shifts, because their clients live in far-distant time zones. Balram's start-up offers rides home to these employees after their late shifts end.
Gradual dehumanization of a marginal urban man can be a fascinating topic. Martin Scorsese treated it onscreen with
Taxi Driver
, and in Chinese writer Mo Yan's 1992 novel
The Republic of Wine
, a callous protagonist, Ding Gouer, startles the reader with his amorality in a rapidly prospering China. Balram, however, leaves the reader indifferent.
In an interview, Adiga has invoked Dickens, Balzac and Flaubert, implying he hopes to do for India what they once did for Europe. That's a tall ambition, and Adiga falls short for a range of reasons, chief among them the implausible plot and cardboard characters.
But above all, what rankles is the narrator's voice, which shifts inexplicably, now revealing erudition an unlettered man cannot possess (such as knowing that a country called Abyssinia once existed), now assuming the pithy timbre of a suave, urbane journalist interpreting India for the unfamiliar (such as readers of Time magazine, where Adiga worked as reporter), now adopting a pedestrian voice with a limited vocabulary. As James Woods discusses in his recent book
How Fiction Works
, clever authors get around their characters' limitations by subtle means, deploying the "free indirect style." Adiga doesn't manage to cover his tracks too well, partly because he wants his novel, and his narrator, to do so many things. His style remains encumbered, and it shows how fiction can't work when it is unsure whether it is fiction or journalism.