Book review: Between the Assassinations

Aravind Adiga

Atlantic Books, 14.99

WHILE Aravind Adiga was writing his Booker Prize-winning debut, The White Tiger, he was also working on Between The Assassinations, a self-described "novel of stories" that was rushed out in India in the wake of his success.

The two books, though different in form, share Adiga's concerns for his country. Poverty, corruption, class and caste resentment and gross inequality are this former journalist's big themes. His characters are usually male, poor, embittered, raging and imprisoned by the status quo. No slumdogs become millionaires in this India.

The action takes place between 1984 and 1991, the years of the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi serving as bookends. Adiga, a former Indian correspondent for Time magazine who lives in Mumbai, imagines a coastal city in south India, Kittur, imbuing it with vivid geographical and historical detail. He includes maps, chronologies and passages lifted from a fictional tourist guide that open each chapter. Kittur, we learn, has a "richness of history and scenic beauty, and diversity of religion, race, and language", thus "a minimum stay of a week is recommended".

In this way Adiga keeps reminding us of the contrast between the India of the backpacker tourist trail and the one endured by the poor majority of Indians. It's a clever framing device, rich in irony, and Adiga has said he was inspired by Balzac's La Comdie Humaine, a sprawling set of volumes exploring French society through interlinked tales.

Kittur is a microcosm, a lens through which to see India. It's a tough place. Poor villagers arrive desperate to earn money and end up exploited by the local mafia boss, Brother, then tossed to the streets. Hindu-Muslim riots are in fact orchestrated by local politicians hungry for real estate. Women in garment factories work under threat of going blind. Rich people cruise the city in Ambassador cars, taking their servants for granted, patronising them, beating them, dropping them on a whim. The cathedral, Kittur's "most important tourist attraction", remains unfinished. Bajpe, the last area of forest in the city, is cut down to make way for a sports stadium.

Each chapter tells a different person's story. Adiga, who in The White Tiger told the breakneck tale of a ranting and raving son of a village rickshaw puller on the up, is at his best when he is at his most angry, his most Dickensian. In one story in Between The Assassinations, a coolie (a cart puller) rails against the injustice of his lot as he pedals to and from rich people's homes, delivering goods. Adiga is unflinching in his descriptions of the back-breaking pain he endures: the sun searing his back, his compressed neck, the physical exhaustion, not to mention the humiliation of defecating by the tracks at the station. "I can't go on like this" is his mantra. "You have to attain a certain level of richness before you complain about being poor, he thought. When you are this poor, you are not given the right to complain."

Adiga's final, stark image is of Chenayya rising in his seat, pedalling away from the traffic "as if he were pulling (it] along with an invisible chain". There is no way out, Adiga tells us, over and over again.

In another story a lower-caste Dalit is arrested and beaten for selling copies of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Another story sees a man who sells fake pills purporting to cure STIs genuinely attempting to help a young boy with a venereal disease. This is Adiga, so don't expect a happy ending.

Elsewhere, a privileged chauffeur-driven boy detonates a bomb in his school because of his simmering anger at being mixed-caste. A journalist goes mad when he admits to himself that the newspaper for which he writes is unable to publish the truth. Women and girls, unfortunately, are either absent or underwritten, and when Adiga turns to the lives of the rich, the results are less convincing.

There is nothing subtle about his prose or its intention. It knocks you about the head like a sledgehammer, and despair and fury are the only responses. Anger is branded on to Adiga's prose, sometimes at the expense of a compelling narrative, and it's a shame that the writing isn't more stylish or sharp. Perhaps Adiga is concerned that this would dilute the force of his message or, worse still, romanticise India. I think it would strengthen it.

Aravinda Adiga is appearing at Blackwell's, Edinburgh, 15 July, 6.30pm, free but ticketed, 0131-622 8222