108 of 115 people found the following review helpful:
Can the tiger escape his cage?
Balram Halwai is a poor low-caste Indian, the son of a rickshaw-puller who somehow manages to crawl his way up to be an entrepreneur in Bangalore. He tells his story via a series of letters written to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier who is about to visit Bangalore. The poor parts of India are referred to as the Darkness which is a world filled with hunger, servitude and...
88 of 97 people found the following review helpful:
A decent read but a disappointing Booker.
We agreed to read the Booker winner for book club, and this book was exactly what I expected. Far from sensationally exposing the little-known 'dark underbelly' of modern India, it is exactly the same as the all the other books exposing the little-known dark underbelly of modern India - we read Q&A last year and this book is pretty much the same, even inferior. In fact,...
Balram Halwai is a poor low-caste Indian, the son of a rickshaw-puller who somehow manages to crawl his way up to be an entrepreneur in Bangalore. He tells his story via a series of letters written to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier who is about to visit Bangalore. The poor parts of India are referred to as the Darkness which is a world filled with hunger, servitude and life-long debt. Modern Delhi is referred to as the Light. This is a world where men and women grow fat, have air-conditioned cars, mobile phones and guarded apartments with large TVs and computer games. But the Light has some very murky aspects to it - bribery, corruption and murder.
The story is told at a blazing pace. Balram is ambitious and astute. He does well to become a driver for a local landlord's family - but he wants more..... The dilemma for him is whether he can shake off his chains by honest means or whether some blood will have to flow. (I was reminded of A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam in which a widow's only way of keeping her children safe is to commit a crime.)
This is not a comfortable read - it is an angry and subversive book about the new India where any notion of the "trickle-down" theory of wealth creation is well and truly quashed. I am not surprised it won the Booker Prize. As a work of literature it is not as good a piece of work as, say, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (also about poverty in India) but it is funny, satirical and a blistering exposé of globalisation.
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We agreed to read the Booker winner for book club, and this book was exactly what I expected. Far from sensationally exposing the little-known 'dark underbelly' of modern India, it is exactly the same as the all the other books exposing the little-known dark underbelly of modern India - we read Q&A last year and this book is pretty much the same, even inferior. In fact, exposing the little-known dark underbelly of modern India seems to be the most popular genre currently in print.
Having said that, this is not a terrible book, although I also didn't find it at all humourous. It is well paced and easy to read and if the author wanted to convey the utter hopelessness of everyone alive in India today, he did this well. Again though, and this is my criticism of all the other books like this, it is hard to believe that nearly everyone in India, rich or poor, is so lacking in empathy and compassion, is driven purely by greed and social status, living a kind of kill-or-be-killed solitary frontier existence. 'Family Matters' by Rohinton Mistry gives a far less obviously sensational portrait of a modern Indian family who happen to find themselves in a country rife with corruption and dead ends, rather than making this sensationalism the point of the book.
Nothing new, nothing outstanding - if I hadn't read this story dozens of times already I might have been more impressed. And was it really better than Rushdie's 'Enchantress' or Ghosh's 'Poppies'? Not for me.
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This is a hilarious,acerbic, unsentimental read about modern-day India, of villages and globalised big cities (Delhi, Bangalore), of venality and corruption.
I like the way the narrator, plays his part as downtrodden servant and driver so wryly and knowingly, although the device that the whole book is an open letter to the Chinese president does not really ring true.
This kind of humour and irony is difficult to keep up for book length but the author manages it superbly well, faltering only in a few places. The main problem with unrelenting irony is you feel no sympathy for the characters. Indeed, apart from the narrator there are only caricatures, and some of these verge on cliché through overuse by the end of the book.
Perhaps the best joke of all is that this book made the Booker Prize long list - as if to say this is far more than a good laugh. But this is emphatically NOT a literary novel. No single character stands out, most are two-dimensional. White Tiger has a feel of bringing us up to date on modern, globalised India, but I feel it skims the surface and does not really get us to the nub of people's hopes and fears about these changes. There are already many non-fiction books that tell us about the call centres, the shopping malls in Gurgaon and the IT outsourcing industry.
There is a message at the end, about the servant mentality, but it does not amount to a theme running through the book. Vikas Swarup's Q&A which came out a couple of years ago did a better job of combining humour with characterisation - his servant-boy perspective was more convincing than White Tiger and gave it better claim to being literary, although it had no such pretensions.
This book reads more as a humourous, satirical extended essay or magazine feature. This is no reason not to enjoy it. For Indian literary fiction there are others, such as Amitav Ghosh (also on the Booker list) a far superior writer but let's face it, not half as funny. White Tiger, it seems to me, is a cuckoo in the Booker nest.
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The one redeeming feature of this novel is it somehow managed to win the Booker Prize - well done to the author for managing that but what on earth were the judges thinking?
It is supposed to give the reader a view of the lower echelons of Indian society and the world they inhabit but I found it lapsed immediately into cliche and did not offer any insight beyond the stereotypical (lotus flowers on filthy rivers, chickens on buses, gridlocked traffic). I was hoping to gain some real insight into life in India on a realistic human level but instead was fed a bunch of hokum which could have been the view of any culturally ignorant person with a bunch of preconceptions. Characters were astonishingly one-dimensional - the rich wannabe Westerner Indian businessmen, the narrator's greedy, grasping slum family and the protaginist himself, they were all so flat as to be beyond belief or empathy.
The quality of the writing did not fare much better. The letter form was confusing, useless and uneccesary. There would be odd excerpts of descriptive dialogue randomly thrown into the first person narrative of a supposedly uneducated person - these did not work. Balram would spend half the time being completely literal then throw in some nonesense about glittering water and heady honeysuckle scents. I read this book really quickly, not because it was such a page turner but because I wanted to get it over and done with and the simplicity of the prose allowed me to run through it without much thought. I completely agree with an earlier review that this was like reading something a high school student wrote, it certainly struck me as childishly written.
One last bugbear of mine was the plot. Because the narrator tells us of the climactic event right at the beginning, I was expecting either a plot twist towards the end or at least some further development of Balram's tale that extended past what he had already revealed. This, too, was nonexistent and just added insult to injury by making the process of struggling through this tome even more unsatifactory and pointless.
I hate to be so harsh on any type of literature, but this book, in regard of its quality compared to the hype, deserves the criticism.
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Having to travel to work on the Metro I was thinking how to make it more interesting and so I joined the others who read on the tram but what to read?
Suddenly whilst looking on Amazon I saw The White Tiger and what a find.
From the start we are transported into a world of amorality within the Indian subcontinent. We follow the main protagonist from village life to the glittering world of the big city and his rise from a rickshaw-pullers son to that of an entrepreneur by amoral means.
It is a book that once you start to read you have to continue no matter how you feel to the protagonists morality or lack of it.
It is a book that I would recommend to all those who love reading about India.
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In The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga opens the lid on contemporary India, examined from the viewpoint of Balram Halwai, an uneducated slum dweller hired by a local landlord as a driver for his westernised son. Modern India, supposedly on the fast track to becoming an economic superpower, is depicted by Adiga as somewhere you definitely don't want to end up, a land of corruption, exploitation, poverty and injustice, where the poor are regularly killed, cheated, framed, or raped by a complacent and idle upper class. Adiga's India is Slumdog Millionaire without the happy ending, a country with a moral void at its heart, where the great mass of people are reduced to living like animals. Yet the slumlords may have met their match in Balram, who plots a scheme to murder his master and steal a fortune.
The book has won high praise for its literacy worth, but I found it difficult to understand why it has been highly praised. The White Tiger is an adequate story of class conflict and revenge, but it is nothing out of the ordinary. Adiga plays safe by writing the story from the perspective of an uneducated driver, and thus saves himself the difficulty of writing elaborate prose, but I found the voice of the narrator unconvincing. It is largely free from the cadences and colloquialisms of a low caste Indian, and Balram's writing has the feel of an educated westerner pretending to be an Indian slum dweller. And why exactly would a murderer confess to his crimes in a 300 page letter to the Chinese Premier? Balram is uneducated, but he is not an idiot, and this illogical premise undermines the credibility of the whole story. Patricia Highsmith wrote better about the murderer as a hero. Tom Ripley is convulsed with guilt and paranoia after murdering his friend and stealing his identity, and this gives him an authenticity to which Balram Halwai never comes close.
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Don't get me wrong, I loved "God of Small Things" and enjoyed "A Suitable Boy" and still think "Shame" is Rushdie's finest novel, but Adiga's "White Tiger" explores a very different India. No elaborate weddings, no saris and spices, no arranged marriages - this is the India of the economic miracle of the 'Electronic City' that is Bangalore, of self-appointed 'entrepreneurs' like Balram Halwai who have come from "the Darkness" of small villages and are eager for wealth and status.
Written in the form of a seven letters to Wen Jiabao, the visiting Chinese premier, offering him lessons in entrepreneurship and democracy, but Balram's rags-to-riches tales is in fact it is a lesson in poverty, humiliation and murder. Adiga's narrative voice is sharp and sardonic, his grasp of telling images and details haunting and his satire of the Indian middle classes lacerating. This is not a novel for those with romantic illusions about India - it is angry, didactic, funny, furious and viscerally compelling
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In his Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga has achieved success where other illustrious writers have fallen short in recent years. Kiran Desai, Monica Ali and Salman Rushdie have all entered the fray and achieved considerable success of their own around themes rooted in the ramshackle, disorganised, free-for-all, cost-cutter basement of globalisation. Characters in their novels might live in New York or London, but their thoughts continue to live in rural south Asia. They might, through their labour, service the desires of the First World rich, but their personal priorities might remain rooted in the concerns of Third World poor. I accept that the grouping of these authors is unfair, since Salman Rushdie's Shalimar The Clown is an overtly political book, whereas Monica Ali's is largely domestic and Kiran Desai's is familiar. But they do all share an overt interest in characters who have left their humble, Third World origins for a First World status that is less than desirable, though their motives might be diverse.
In The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga tries a different tack, and achieves much. The scenario is unlikely, deliberately comic. The book presents a narrative - apparently constructed in just seven evenings at a personal computer - by one Belram, a man with origins in a poor area of an Indian countryside he calls Darkness. Essentially, there are seven blogs or emails addressed to Wen Jiabao via the Premier's Office, Beijing, China in which the first person narrator tells his story. Belram, presumably, believes that the Chinese people, via their leader, need advice on how to succeed in the globalised twenty-first century. Since Belram has indeed succeeded, he wants to share his experience as potential assistance to the most populous nation on earth.
Belram's rise can be listed without jeopardising the potential reader's interest or involvement with the book. He was of utterly poor rural origin, but luckily - and also perhaps rather deviously - secured a job as a driver for the middle-class, urban Mr Ashok. By the end of the tale Belram has his own business in Bangalore, a place as far from his own origins as any international destination. He now owns a taxi fleet that services the anti-social working hours of the growing city's relocated call centres, whose First World cost-cutter owners provide the financial umbrella-shade in which budding entrepreneurs like Belram may shelter and prosper. Thus he eases himself a rung or two up the social and economic ladder. If only the elevation might have happened without treading on others...
The White Tiger is a delightful and engaging book. The narrator's humour and world-outlook are both entertaining and stimulating. The book's improbable structure presents no problem whatsoever once Belram's engaging style is established. His story is simple, devious, credible and incredible in one, and perhaps as close to a truth as one might ever approach. Literature is full of schemers and opportunists. Anti-heroes, however, rarely convince. Belram, on the other hand, almost demands we share his success via emulation, and I encourage all readers to enter his world on his terms.
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In contrast to the main character of The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga received an extensive education from some of the best institutions available-Columbia undergrad and then Oxford. In his book, however, Balram Halwai, the White Tiger or sweet maker, grows up with a very minimal education, scratching by barely with the ability to read in a system designed, it seems to keep one ignorant rather than to educate. In fact the whole system of castes in India, in modern day India, through the eyes of Balram, tends to rigidly, forcefully and cruelly keep one either in the category of servant and poverty or of the privileged and well-off. To a minimal extent Balram bucks the system and rises above his father and becomes a driver for a wealthy family. Even the wealthy, however, must maintain their businesses and position through a corrupt system of bribes to politicians who stay in power through a democracy that disenfranchises certainly the poor and perhaps others as well.
The book is written well with energy and a steady string of either interesting or amusing anectdotes as Balram progresses from "the darkness" or poor, rural India to Delhi which appears as a city in a state of rapid but chaotic modernization where buildings are rising steadily for either malls or job centers for outsourced work from countries like the US. Again the inequities abound for Balram,the driver, and those like him, and the superior castes appear anything but. The book is fast-paced and entertaining.
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I saw the author on tv recently say that he wanted to write about the 'real India' and if he has succeeded (I've not visited the county) I'm not surprised the novels's jacket suggests that India's tourist board won't be pleased with the result.
The coutry is aflow with sewage and dirt and only money and ruthless ambition will keep you out of it: very Dickensian. Adiga portrays an India where everyone in authority welcomes a backhander and the only way for a poor person to succeeed is through murder, ar at the very least by allowing themselves to be corrupted (like the fellow villager who finds end up with an important government job).
The narrator is writing to China's premier to tell him about the 'real' India in the run up to his visiting the country. He wants to lift the veil on the country and tell the man how things really are. I found what he described shocking and depressing. His take on Indian culture was illuminating and he seems to conclude that whilst India may soon emerge as a super power few of the country's problems are likely to be addressed for its ordinary citizens. Like China found during the Olympics, India may also have to deal with increased criticism of it's social structure as its international profile increases.
A lot of people refer to the novels humour but I didn't find any of it particularly funny. What I did find was a great read, a readable Booker winner (!),a book that showed me another world and one that made me think. Read it!
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