A clever cartoon for grown-ups

FICTION: The White Tiger By Aravind AdigaAtlantic, 321pp, £10.99

BEHIND EVERY story lurks the truth. Aravind Adiga certainly believes this to be true. His tough, streetwise debut sets out to expose a different aspect of modern India as well as subverting contemporary Indian fiction.

His narrator Balram has sufficient anger to generate most of the electricity needed to light up the night sky of India. It has to be said that this Westernised exposé is unlike any other Indian novel of the moment. There is none of the philosophy, little of the comedy and none of the usual, brilliantly assured characterisation. Balram is different, he has had a nightmarish childhood and his experiences have left him shrewder, wiser and well, just that bit more dangerous.

This offbeat, slightly-plotted near monologue, which is among the six titles under consideration for the 2008 Man Booker Prize which will be decided on Tuesday, borrows in tone from Camus's classic La Chute. Admittedly Balram is somewhat less sophisticated than the self-styled judge-penitent Jean-Baptiste Clamance. Yet Balram does present his tale spanning seven days and nights of recollections in the form of an address to the Chinese premier.

He certainly begins well, "Sir, Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can only be said in English." He goes on to explain that he fears that the Chinese premier on arrival in India will be told how "moral and saintly India is." He believes it to be otherwise.

Balram is an entrepreneur. His own tried and tested methods, which include murder, have enabled him to become one. "Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay," he informs the Chinese premier.

Be warned, the powerful image of the White Tiger, a rare creature that appears as if from heaven, is not used the way one might suspect - although there is a sequence in which one trapped in a zoo is reduced to a passive exhibit.

From the outset the narrative has a bitter, jokey tone, presenting India as a filthy, hopeless country. Adiga just about manages to offset this diatribe through the pace of the action which races along with some gusto. Balram, who has a fear of lizards, is no hero; he has had a hard life, no family support, no schooling and keeps his grudges stacked up in a neat pile. It is a very big pile. At no time does one even feel sorry for him. But then Adiga isn't interested in evoking a sympathetic response.

The White Tiger is a fierce, angry book. "See, my first day in school, the teacher made all the boys line-up and come to this desk so he could put our names down in his register. When I told him what my name was, he gaped at me: "Munna? That's not a real name." To which the narrator adds, "He was right: it just means 'boy'." His father was a rickshaw-puller and as the narrator once told his teacher, "He's got no time to name me." Oh and throughout that hard early boyhood his mother was dying.

She died "when I was six or seven or eight years (no one in my village knows his exact age). He describes her funeral: "I remember going down the steps of a downhill road in the holy city of Benaras, at the rear of a funeral procession carrying my mother's body to the Ganga," the holy river of which he has already mentioned to the Chinese premier, "I urge you not to dip in the Ganga, unless you want your mouth full of faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven kinds of industrial acids."

He saw his mother's toes melting in the heat. His schooling doesn't last long and he is despatched to work in a tea shop.

Fate intervenes and he begins working as a chauffeur for a couple, an Indian master and his loud American wife, "Pinky Madam."

Balram watches them as he drives them about and ferries her to the nearest mall. On its own merits, this is a confident if tediously limited yarn; the most interesting aspect is the slow, deliberate way in which the narrator leads him to the death of his master - who has by then already been abandoned by his wife. The observations throughout are sharp, as sharp as may be expected from someone who is caught up in a form of stalemate and is intent on something better.

Aside from the simmering rage there is not all that much to a narrative which is filtered through the angry consciousness of an unsympathetic anti-hero smug with his insider's knowledge. Perhaps Adiga should be cheered for daring to show the corruption at the heart of India? But that alone is insufficient - besides this is a book that may as well be about anywhere and everywhere, but nowhere in particular. Also stalking The White Tiger is the proven quality of contemporary Indian fiction, among the strongest in the world.

It is impossible to justify the Man Booker selection of this average, observation-driven tale over quality fiction such as Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil, one of the finest - and most eloquent - novels published in recent years.

In comparison with it, and with Damon Galgut's underrated The Impostor, The White Tiger appears a trite and opportunistic study of human rottenness as a way of survival. At very best, for all its confidence and Adiga's obvious flair never mind his daring socio-political agenda, it is merely a clever cartoon for grown-ups.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times