The White Tiger: A Novel

Book Review Title: The White Tiger Author: Aravind Adiga There are few extraordinary jems around India still haven't gathered the wide popularity yet even though being recognized and showered with awards. Aravind Adiga is one such and his book The White Tiger is an example of the the fact that there are literary authors in this country who can create magic with words. The White Tiger deals with the raw practicality of Indian lives and discovers the greyer shades of human nature, needs and desire. The White Tiger is basically the story of every lower middle class guy who thrives to achieve "something" in life selfishly. Without giving much away I recommend this book for everyone. The narration is topnotch. A four and a half stars for The White Tiger

One of the most phenomeal books that I have read thus far and this is coming from someone who reads almost 60 books in a year. It is the naked reality of life . It is what ever homeless or lowly paid Indian fantasies more than sex but only few can walk this devastating path. The risk a man can take just to experience life -even for a fraction of second. Behind the dark comedy the author passes on a powerful message. The biggest regret of a man/woman is now what he/she does -it is what he/she fails to do to fulfill their destiny.

This book was chosen for me to read by a book club, so would not be the usual subject matter that I default to. (Great purpose of a book club,). It is quite a griitty tale, a story highlighting the caste system in India is alive and well with the have and have nots. If this story is a true representation of the current India it shows how the further up the Have scale you are,what with corruption rife through India the more untouchable you are. The book was advertised as humorous, I must admit it, I found very little humour, it’s no barrel of laughs, but it is a story worth reading just to get a different insight into one side of India. Also this is the first Man Booker prize winner book have have actually enjoyed, that award is usually the kiss of death for a book for me!

Published in the year of the credit crunch, six years before Arundhati Roy's 'Capitalism: A Ghost Story' appeared, it gives the lie to what she would later write there: 'These stories about the poor, their amazing spirit and resilience, have no villains - except the small ones who provide narrative tension and local colour.' (p.37) On the contrary, 'The White Tiger' is narrated by a villain. It also scrutinises the rich. It was a story wholly subversive of the 'Slumdog Millionaire' school which Roy would decry. As the narrator (and protagonist) says, 'You can't expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet' (p.33). 'The White Tiger' pretends to be epistolary, in letters addressed from the informal economy of India to the then-premier of China. The conceit is that the Chinese Communist Party is being given a business seminar by a survivor from its rival economy. Like John Banville's murderer in 'The Book of Evidence', Balram knows what he has done. Like Henry Fielding's 'Tom Jones', his tale is a picaresque (though it stays within India). His letters are written at night while he waits to start scamming over the internet. Balram depicts the 'incidental advantages' of a government job (p.33) and the snobbery of the new elite fawning over 'slimy' politicians or complaining that their work is not 'clean' from the back of a chauffeured car (p.210). In the depiction of the American wife and the bourgeois Indian husband there is a fairly crude comment on the impropriety of upper middle class Indian ambition. Balram also lampoons 'the Great Socialist...the voice of the poor of India!' (p.268) whose real hopes are only for himself. Everyone of all classes is in the same snake pit. Rather than morality the book has humour and realism. It has no points for action. There is no transformation in it. 'Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.' (p.98) The book has laughter but not hope. If the point of a Marxist critique of capitalism was that capitalism is degrading for both employer and worker (though in ways much more congenial to the employer), there's no strong view of humanity here. It's a depiction of alienation without end which threatens to misfire, rather (oddly) as Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ' did; which showed the Passion without prelude or explanation and so risked misleading us into an obsession with squalor. Readers would have to come supplied already with some world-view which might make sense of this book, because its cynicism is all-pervasive. So in the end it does have a salon feel about it, but a salon in which 'Sortez les sortants!' is more to everyone's taste. That's not really enough.

“The White Tiger” is written as a letter from Balram Halwai to the Chinese prime minister in which Balram offers himself as an example of an Indian entrepreneur. He tells of his impoverished childhood in a small village, a few years of schooling before his family sends him to work in a tea shop and how he eventually gets a job as the chauffeur for one of the married sons of the local wealthy family that controls everything in the village from the economy to the lives of the residents. The Americanized son and his wife are tasked with moving to Delhi and greasing any palms necessary to keep the family interests going. Balram quietly goes about his job—until the day he murders his boss—a fact he readily admits early on in the novel. He then uses his ex-boss’s money to start what becomes a very successful business. Aravind Adiga does an exceptional, and often funny, job of weaving many of India’s problems into his tale: large scale poverty, rampant corruption, class inequality, inadequate education. He creates a poor but smart, hard-working protagonist you want to like and root for, but who is also a smug, amoral murderer. Balram seems so pleasant that I kept reading to find out what drove this seemingly docile man to murder. The implications of Balram as a symbol of lower class Indians (polite and eager to please while seething underneath), are plenty uncomfortable. Adiga never gets preachy or long-winded. Much like Mohsin Hamid’s 2014 novel, “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” “The White Tiger” entertains and disturbs all at once.