[ book tip by Jade Weighell ] The trouble with reading a book that has just won the Booker Prize is that it is impossible to start reading it without certain expectations. To have won such a prestigious award the book must certainly have to have an intricate and involving plot, it must use language in an exciting way, and it must have characters and themes that will draw the reader in and leave them thinking once the book is closed. I suspect I expect too much and so it is not surprising that I ultimately end up a bit disappointed; as I did when I read The White Tiger, which seemed a bit lacking in all these things.  

The White Tiger tells the story of Balram Halwai, who is born, the son of a rickshaw puller, in a small Indian village. After his father’s death he manages to get a job as a chauffeur and ends up leaving the darkness of the village for the bright lights of Delhi. Delhi is a place of corruption and it is not long before Balram’s heart is sullied and he commits a crime to escape what he calls the Rooster Coop, in which all the poor of India are trapped.  

The novel evokes India and highlights all in the injustices within it, though I have seen India evoked with greater passion and colour in other novels such as Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, the latter illustrating the lives of the poor in India with greater heart than Aravind Adiga does. The problem was in many cases I felt that I was being told rather than shown; which engages the head, but leaves the heart behind.

Another slight gripe that I have is that once Adiga latches onto a metaphor he uses it again and again until you become bored of it. Sometimes, in literature, less is definitely more.

I’m not saying that this is a bad book, far from it. It’s just that, with the expectations of it being a prizewinner, I wanted it to be spectacular and unfortunately it wasn’t.  

[ book info ] Adiga, Aravind: The White Tiger. (original language: English) Atlantic Books, USA, 2008 (2008). ISBN: 978-1-84354-720-4.