Last Man In Tower - Aravind Adiga

Review by Nicky Pellegrino

I cooked a lot of curry while I was reading Aravind Adiga’s new novel Last Man In Tower (Atlantic, $32.99). Not that it’s an especially foodie book but it’s so richly redolent of India that it made me want to transport myself there, if only by taste.

Indian novels, like the country itself, tend to be sprawling and over-crowded affairs; nothing ever happens fast, and this one is no exception. Yet Adiga’s follow-up novel to his Booker Prize winning The White Tiger is suspenseful and compelling all the same.

It’s set in Mumbai and concerns the inhabitants of a crumbling apartment complex Vishram Society. Although bordered by slums, this is home to respectable middle class workers and dear friendships have been formed there over the years. On fine evenings the residents of Tower A gather on white plastic chairs in the shared compound. They bicker, share meals, watch each other’s children, know each other’s business. Aside from the unreliable water supply, the community seems a small Utopia.  But change has come to Mumbai, slums are being demolished and the old way of life swept away. And this change is about to catch up with the residents of Vishram Society.

Before he dies bronchial property developer Dharmen Shah wants to create his legacy - a magnificent luxury apartment complex. He has chosen Vishram Society as the perfect site to build it and so makes a generous offer to buy out the residents in order to demolish the building. Naturally people are divided, the old ones especially having no desire to move, but gradually these are whittled down until one man alone stands against the development, a retired teacher known as Masterji. He doesn’t care that poor Mrs Puri needs the payout to provide a secure feature for her Downs Syndrome son, that other neighbours want the money to educate children or make long held dreams come true. A stubborn old widower he is convinced he occupies the highest moral ground and refuses to budge.

Last Man In Tower (author left) is an extended fable really, a study in how far civilised people are prepared to go to get the things they want and how easily they can find ways to justify it. It’s a slippery slope of a story – to begin with the people of Vishram Society use reasonable means to persuade Masterji to change his mind but with small steps they edge closer to iniquity. No one among the vast cast of characters is wholly good or bad: not even Shah the property mogul who performs random acts of kindness, or Masterji the noble teacher who we see is also rather vain.

There’s a definite Dickensian quality here: from the portrayal of greed, to the thinly disguised social commentary and many of the incidental characters that crop up along the way. At times Adiga is a little heavy handed - Shah’s lungs, for instance, are rather neatly being destroyed by the toxic dusts of the very construction sites that have brought him wealth and status. But for the most part this writing is sheer beauty: darkly humorous, brilliantly observed and ultimately rather bleak.

It is Mumbai that dominates the entire tale: a city of banyan trees and bustle, gothic buildings, heat, monsoons and merciless change. A place where Adiga tells us in a curiously direct passage, the question on everyone’s lips is, What do you want?

“Only a man must want something; for everyone who lives here knows that the islands will shake and the mortar of the city will dissolve, and Bombay will again turn into seven small stones glistening in the Arabian Sea, if it ever forgets to as the question: What do you want?”


Footnote:
Nicky Pellegrino is a succcesful Auckland-based author of popular fiction, The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009, Recipe for Life was published in April, 2010, while her latestThe Villa Girls, was published in April this year.

She is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 24 July, 2011