Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #172 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Winning the Man Booker prize is something that most authors dream of, although -- ironically -- the reputation of the prize itself was under siege a few years ago. Books that won the award were acquiring a reputation of being difficult and inaccessible, but those days appear to be over -- and unarguable proof may be found in the 2008 winner, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Apart from its considerable literary merit, the novel is the most compelling of pageturners (in the old-fashioned sense of that phrase) and offers a picture of modern India that is as evocative as it is unflattering. The protagonist, too, is drawn in the most masterly of fashion.

Balram Halwai, the eponymous ‘white tiger’, is a diminutive, overweight ex-teashop worker who now earns his living as a chauffeur. But this is only one side of his protean personality; he deals in confidence scams, over-ambitious business promotions (built on the shakiest of foundations) and enjoys approaching life with a philosophical turn of mind. But is Balram also a murderer? We learn the answer as we devour these 500 odd pages. Born into an impoverished family, Balram is removed from school by his parents in order to earn money in a thankless job: shop employee. He is forced into banal, mind-numbing work. But Balram dreams of escaping -- and a chance arises when a well-heeled village landlord takes him on as a chauffeur for his son (although the duties involve transporting the latter's wife and two Pomeranian dogs). From the rich new perspective offered to him in this more interesting job, Balram discovers New Delhi, and a vision of the city changes his life forever. His learning curve is very steep, and he quickly comes to believe that the way to the top is by the most expedient means. And if that involves committing the odd crime of violence, he persuades himself that this is what successful people must do.

The story of the amoral protagonist at the centre of this fascinating narrative is, of course, what keeps the reader comprehensively gripped, but perhaps the real achievement of the book is in its picture of two Indias: the bleak, soul-destroying poverty of village life and the glittering prizes to be found in the big city. The book cleverly avoids fulfilling any of the expectations a potential reader might have -- except that of instructing and entertaining. The White Tiger will have many readers anxious to see what Adiga will do next. --Barry Forshaw

Review
"'[An] extraordinary and brilliant first novel... Adiga is a real writer - that is to say, someone who forges an original voice and vision.' Sunday Times * "[A] blazingly savage and brilliant first novel... Not a single detail in this novel rings false or feels confected. The White Tiger is an excoriating piece of work, stripping away the veneer of 'India Rising'... That it also manages to be suffused with mordant wit, modulating to clear-eyed pathos, means Adiga is going places as a writer." - Neel Mukherjee, Sunday Telegraph * "Unlike almost any other Indian novel you might have read in recent years, this page-turner offers a completely bald, angry, unadorned portrait of the country as seen from the bottom of the heap; there's not a sniff of saffron or a swirl of sari anywhere. [Adiga's hero] is an enticing figure... Even more impressive is the nitty-gritty of Indian life that Adiga unearths the corruption, the class system, the sheer petty viciousness... You'll read it in a trice and find yourself gripped." - Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times * "Extraordinary and brilliant... Adiga is a real writer - that is to say, someone who forges an original voice and vision... The voice of Halwai - witty, pithy, ultimately psychopathic... [is] remarkable." - Adam Lively, Sunday Times"

Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times
`Unlike almost any other Indian novel you might have read in recent years, this page-turner offers a completely bald, angry, unadorned portrait of the county as seen from the bottom of the heap; there's not a sniff of saffron or a swirl of sari anywhere... The Indian tourist board won't be pleased, but you'll read it in a trice and find yourself gripped.'

Customer Reviews

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 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.

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, 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.

A cuckoo in the Booker nest
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.