The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga has won the Booker prize, the third debut novelist to do so in the forty years of Booker winners. It’s bad enough knowing he’s only 33, and it’s his first book, but what really pains is the fact that Paddy Power was running 7/1 odds on this book before they closed betting this morning. Anyway. Described in this newspaper as a “fierce, angry book”, our own Eileen Battersby went on to describe it as “a trite and opportunistic study of human rottenness as a way of survival,” adding that at best, it is “merely a clever cartoon for grown-ups.” Which is clearly not what the Booker judges thought. One man’s meat and all, but does tonight’s decision support Julian Barne’s assertion that “the only sensible attitude to the Booker is to treat it as posh bingo”?