THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE LONG LIST
Five down, eight to go

THE WHITE TIGER
Aravind Adiga – Atlantic - $38

Perhaps the most astonishing feature of this year’s long list of thirteen titles is that five of them are debut novels. Even weeks after the list’s announcement I still find myself disbelieving that this could be so.

The White Tiger is the second of the five first books that I have read and I have to say that this is another remarkable piece of fiction. The author’s approach is not new or unusual, telling his story by way of a series of letters written over a period of one week. What is surprising is the person to whom our narrator and anti-hero, Balram Halwai, is writing. None less than the Premier of China who next week is visiting the city where Balram lives, Bangalore, India. The letters are a confession of sorts as Balram recounts his life story culminating in the present when he is a successful entrepreneur but he has blood on his hands.

It is pretty brutal stuff at times, darkly comic in places and one gets the sense that the author is keen to show the real India with its enormous gulf between the haves and have-nots. These days one hears much about the new India with its dynamic, burgeoning economy and while that is no doubt an accurate picture there is also a giant under belly of society where advancement can only be achieved by patronage, corruption and thuggery. There is a lot of injustice about and there are definitely two Indias and this is what the author portrays.

One can only imagine the confusion the Premier of China would have experienced had he received these seven long letters!

Now on to Child 44. Yet another first novel.