Book review: Between Assassinations, by Arvind Adiga

AFTER WINNING THE BOOKER Prize last year, Aravind Adiga was heralded as a bold and entirely new voice, writing about India's dystopic reality in unpretentious, democratic prose. In truth, he isn't the first or the best, belonging to a robust crop of writers who have shaken off India's colonial deference to the English language to write with raw honesty. Unlike most of them, though, he has been fortunate enough to get a UK publisher and a Western audience.

Having excoriated the pretensions and injustices of modern India, he has now written an historical piece situated between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv, that ended the Nehru dynasty's 40-year monopoly of Indian politics. Located in the fictional south Indian town of Kittur, it consists of a series of vignettes weaving together characters from a variety of castes, religions and backgrounds to give a textured and intimate sense of the exhausting complexity of Indian life and its stifling social attitudes – very much like R K Narayan did with his Malgudi novels but with a dark and smutty sense of humour.

His direct, low-key and accessible prose is his great strength, producing pithy stark images such as the frantic schoolteacher whose bloated torso is "pregnant with a dozen heart attacks", or an impoverished coolie who is "another of those lean, lonely men with vivid eyes who haunt every train station". Rich or poor, Muslim or Hindu, he doesn't romanticise Indians, portraying them as what they are: people living with the stress of India's poverty and their myriad neuroses – about their faith, social status and sex lives. He makes Indians ordinary, allowing non-Indians a window onto them without the obfuscating lyricism that previously dominated Indian literature.

Kittur is an Indian everycity in which businessmen contend with ubiquitous corruption and rustics arrive penniless at bus stands, seeking employment while sleeping on pavements rented from goons, and where the emotions of the poor are manipulated to keep a few in power. A professor explains how caste loyalty is used to get people elected while the masses never realise that politicians belong to their caste's highest subset, the ones who've "always been millionaires". He articulates the basic flaw in the Indian condition: "This is the biggest problem with you Hindus. You are mysteries to yourselves."

The period of 1984-91 in which it is set was the most fraught in modern Indian history. Multiple insurgencies took place amid the decay of a sclerotic socialist economy that had steeped the country in endemic corruption and all-pervasive poverty. Adiga is not a good historical writer; he refers vaguely to terrorists and riots but none of the particular anxiety of that time comes to life. Nor does he consider the biggest question about India: how does a country in which so much is so wrong still get so much so right?

Despite the assassinations of its prime ministers, the chaos of its politics and the tensions between castes, classes, regions and religions, India maintained its unity and pluralist ideals and staggered onto the world stage as an emerging superpower and the most dynamic democracy on earth. Addressing India's strengths with the unsentimental candour that he applies to its weaknesses would be the mark of a pioneering novelist. Readable as his new book is, he missed an opportunity truly to become the trailblazer that many think he already is.