Aravind Adiga: The White Tiger (2008)

Edition: Atlantic Books, 2008
Review number:  1392

In my reading of Booker prize short listed novels, I've reached the 2008 winner. While many short listed novels fail to interest me, The White Tiger received reviews which made it sound more likely to be my cup of tea; and this indeed turned out to be the case.

The White Tiger of the title is the narrator of this novel. As a small boy in an Indian village school, he is told that his intelligence marks him out from the rest as the colour of a white tiger does. But he has no real chance to use that intelligence, due to the extreme poverty of his background: his family is so poor that the needs of fighting for survival leave no one with the time to give him a name, so that he arrives at the school just known as Munna ("boy"), and the teacher has to give him a name - Balwan Halwai - to enrol him. However, by the end of the book (as is revealed right at the start, so this isn't giving anything away), he has become a rich entrepreneur in Bangalore, centre of the Indian IT industry's outsourcing boom.

The White Tiger is structured as a series of long emails from Balwan to Wen Jibao, (real life) Chinese statesman about to visit India. The emails are meant to explain something of the reality of life in India, behind the sanitised facade presented to foreign visitors, particularly when they are important politicians. Balwan does this by describing how he developed from the poorest of poor children to a rich businessman. A typical example anecdote is the contrast between India presenting itself as the world's largest democracy, yet when Balwan is eighteen, he is made to sign a piece of paper entitling his village's landlords to use his vote as they see fit for the remainder of his life.

It is easy to assume that this is a satirical novel in which everything is exaggerated for comic effect. Perhaps it is, and I'm pretty sure that at least the events described are unlikely to have ever happened to just one individual. However, Adiga writes in such a way that everything is believable - at the time, at least. Even if I had ever actually visited India, I would have been the kind of foreign outsider - a tourist - who would not have seen the worst side of India's poverty. So it's hard to evaluate the plausibility of The White Tiger. Some things, like the vote anecdote, I think are likely to be true; others, like the issue of Balwan's name, seem much more unlikely.

India figures heavily in the list of Booker winners I particularly like: Midnight's Children, The God of Small Things (also a first novel) are the obvious examples, and would probably be high in many best Booker winner lists. Like those, The White Tiger goes beyond the somewhat simplistic view that many Booker shortlisted novels seem to have about the British Colonial past; there may be plenty of reasons why the British should feel post-colonial guilt, but not everything bad that has happened since independence can be the fault of the colonial administration. The three books also use black humour, to differing extents: Adiga most, then Rushdie, then Roy. And all three are very atmospheric.

No matter how dark things get, The White Tiger is viciously funny. It is an unusually accessible and enjoyable Booker novel, and I would definitely endorse it as a worthy winner - 9/10.

Ian McDonald: River of Gods (2004)

Edition: Simon & Schuster, 2004
Review number: 1271

India is, as pretty much everyone says, a fascinating place. Full of the ancient and embracing the modern, united by a colonial power yet, independent, maintaining that unity in the face of massive pressures both internal and external, home to hundreds of millions of people, who believe in thousands of gods and demons and live in conditions ranging between as poor and as wealthy as anyone on the planet. There have been massive changes since independence in 1947 (as chronicled by writers such as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roi) - so a natural question is what will India be like in about fifty years time, on the hundredth anniversary of independence? Of course, no one currently knows, but Ian McDonald has given us his image of what the subcontinent might be like at that point, woven into an extremely traditional science fictional plot, the investigation of an alien artefact. The other main plot strand is the development - or, rather, evolution - of artificial intelligences known as aeais many times brighter than human beings, who are sought out and destroyed being considered a threat.

What is immediately interesting about McDonald's future is how little is actually different. Science fiction authors generally emphasise the changes; he gives more prominent to what remains the same. It is mainly the details that have changed - better computing, slicker entertainment (computer generated soap operas, personal aeai DJs to give you a customised soundtrack to the world); water has replaced oil as the resource to fight wars over, especially in a fragmented India where the monsoon has failed three years running; the ability to choose "designer babies" has created a Hindu middle class in which girls have suddenly acquired massive scarcity value, and where there is a neuter subculture vaguely like gay culture in the West today. None of these changes are terribly earth shattering in science fiction terms (compare this novel with Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, for example). And so as a result Indian society doesn't seem to have changed terribly much: most of what we read about would seem reasonably familiar to the characters of Midnight's Children.

While a science fiction fan like myself can definitely find "prior art" for the various elements of River Gods, McDonald has put them together to produce something which is convincing (if a little conservative), interesting and enjoyable to read.

Rudyard Kipling: Plain Tales From the Hills (1888)

Edition: Wordsworth, 1992
Review number: 846

Kipling's first collection, of stories published in journals, contains a large number of quite short stories. They are all about India, and nearly all about the British in India. He establishes the subject which inspired so much of his work right at the beginning; that is, how India affected the British soldiers and officials who worked there. (Of course, the British changed India too, but that is not what Kipling chose to write about, and in many of his stories the subcontinent is portrayed as so vast, so alien and so primordial that these changes were superficial, hardly touching the real India.)

The social breadth among the British pictured by Kipling is quite wide, though mainly confined to young officers and clerks. Several stories are about how India educates young men sent out from a sheltered life in England. Among the best of these are the ones involving the scheming Mrs Hawksbee, but the collection is evenly good. As a début, it had quite an effect, and it is not surprising that Kipling went on to become one of the best short story writers in English.

Rudyard Kipling: The Second Jungle Book (1895)

Edition: Penguin, 1987 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 828

The original Jungle Book contained some stories which nowadays would be considered rather daring in a childrens' book because of their treatment of death. In The Second Jungle Book, this is even more the case, with violent death a commonplace. This is almost the "jungle red in tooth and claw", and it is going to be very surprising to anyone whose only prior acquaintance with the stories comes from the Disney cartoons. Things are slightly softened, mainly so that the stories will work, but death is present in every one.

A larger proportion of the stories are about Mowgli than is the case in the earlier book; the two tales which aren't are poorer in quality than their counterparts, Quiquern in particular being quite forgettable. The Mowgli stories, on the other hand, are very good indeed. They are not as immediately gripping as his duel with Shere Khan or the encounter with the monkeys, and it is easy to see why Kipling later redistributed the stories. (In the redistributed version, the mood does swing moves quite rapidly, as the stories from the different books are read.) The Second Jungle Book is more aimed at adults and older children than the first; it could be quite disturbing.

Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book (1894)

Edition: Penguin, 1987 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 810

Strangely enough, the text of even such a well known story as The Jungle Book can be quite complicated. In the original publications of this and its sequel, The Second Jungle Book, each collection contained a number of Mowgli stories and others not related to them. Then, when the first collected edition of Kipling's work came out a few years later, all the Mowgli stories were printed together in The Jungle Book, and all the others as The Second Jungle Book. This Penguin edition, which contains both books, replaces the stories in their original order.

One of the problems with The Jungle Book is that most people first encounter them through the Disney film, or through the distortions used by Baden Powell in the Scout movement. Neither of these really equal the original stories, which must rank as one of the greatest pieces of children's literature ever written. The original collection includes three Mowgli stories and four others, two of which are among my favourite pieces of Kipling's writing, The White Seal and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

The reasons that the stories are so successful are several, and include Kipling's great strengths of atmospheric background and characterisation of the animals. (This only fails to work in Servants of the Queen, he last story in the collection.) The Mowgli stories and The White Seal, in particular, hint at something more than enjoyable children's tales, with the idea of moving from one world to another (childhood to adulthood?) prominent in the first and death in the second. (It is no accident that it takes a creature already extinct to direct Kotick to a place where the seals can be safe from the hunters.) Few writers today would dare write in this kind of way for children, though much of it is probably aimed more at adult readers.

One thing that is really amazing about the Mowgli stories is that they are set in a part of India that Kipling never visited. He creates an atmospheric narrative really out of our expectations of what a jungle should be like; he even takes liberties with the natural histories that he used as sources of information (the wild elephant, for example, not being native to the area).

Rudyard Kipling: Life's Handicap (1891)

Edition: MacMillan, 1982
Review number: 665

Rudyard Kipling produced a large number of short stories, including some of his best known writing (The Jungle Book, for example, being a collection of connected tales). They are quite varied, even when dealing with a specific theme, as here: Life's Handicap contains twenty seven stories about the experience of the British in India. Some have dated more than others, but they all have the marvellous sense of atmosphere which is the hallmark of Kipling's writing.

It is often said against Kipling that he was an imperialist, and it is hardly possible to deny it - there are moments when his now uncomfortable assumptions about the superiority of the white man become apparent. Kipling fits into the time and place of his background as well as most people do, and it is rather unfair to expect him to have the attitudes of someone born a century later. The chosen theme of most of his writing makes these background ideas particularly obvious, so that he is something of a sitting target. He is a greater writer than the two others who have survived and who also can be accused of the same kind of unconscious racism (I'm thinking of Buchan and Haggard), and he is much less one sided. He writes about unpleasant Europeans, of British officers who fail, as well as of ones who are as infallible gods to their native servants. His characters, even in the short stories, are more than the stereotypes of cheap imperialist fiction.

In the case of Life's Handicap, I remain slightly uneasy despite the excellence of many of the stories. This is because of the title of the collection, for which the only interpretation I can think of is slightly racist (though possibly just reflective of the social situation in nineteenth century India): that some people have a superior position or an inferior one from the start of their lives, dependent on whether they are Indian or European. It may be a racist idea, but Kipling didn't originate the system, and it was certainly true.

Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (1981)

Edition: Jonathan Cape, 1981
Review number: 466

Being born in Bombay at midnight (to the second) on August 15, 1947 makes Saleem Sinai a special child, for he comes into existence at precisely the moment of Indian and Pakistani independence. This fact has an obvious symbolic significance linking him to both countries, and he grows up having a life which mirrors the history of the two countries (and later three, after the separation of Bangladesh).

Like the other children born between midnight and one in that morning, Saleem has strange magic powers, stronger in him because his birth came so close to midnight. This amounts in him to the telepathic ability to tune into the thoughts of others, making him feel uniquely qualified as a chronicler of the history of the subcontinent following independence.

Rushdie's novel combines the realist, symbolic and magical in a unique way, and Midnight's Children is probably the best example of how he does it. Through the coalescence of Saleem's bizarre peronal history with the world around him, he is able to say something about what independence has meant to the three countries. Having something to say perhaps motivates the novel so that it is more effective than his later writing.

The roots of the magical realist style lie in science fiction and fantasy, yet it is difficult to point to any specific author as a direct influence. The idea of a hidden group with special powers is quite common (examples can be found in John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos and A.E. van Vogt's Slan), and a mundane world with magic in it is a commonplace of fantasy. The non-genre author of whom I was constantly reminded by Salim's autobiography is Lawrence Sterne; there are many echoes of Tristram Shandy. It is principally the style which is reminiscent of this book, but it is the way that the fantastic is blended in which makes possible Rushdie's blurring of the distinction between reality and metaphor, which in turn gives the novel the ability to make satiric points.

Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things (1997)

Edition: Flamingo, 1997
Review number: 385

Roy's first novel is wonderfully evocative, both of what it is to live in modern India and also of the world of a small child. It revolves around the return to the town of Ayumenem of Rahel after years away, and a longer period without seeing her fraternal twin brother Estha. The experience of the small child is explored through their memories of the events that led up to Estha being sent away to join the twins' distant father.

This childhood world is evoked through unusual ways of looking at things, the interest in silly word games (such as reading backwards), the reuse of half understood phrases that adults have been heard using. It is very well done, never descending to the level of cuteness that is such an obvious trap here: Roy takes her child characters very seriously.

The India that she portrays is one of rapidly changing culture. Like the European characters in Kipling and Forster novels set in the country, Roy's children are to a large extent outsiders, coming from an upper class family of Syrian Christians educated in Western style schools. They are far more able to associate with the Hindus around them than an English child would have been in the days of the Raj, of course. Another way in which they are different is that they come from a "broken home"; their mother, Ammu, having returned with them to her family after her husband descended into alcoholism and wife beating.

There is a lot of tension built into the novel, and this is done through the two timelines: the adult reliving her childhood memories knows that something terrible is going to happen. The terrible events are directly driven by the contrast between old and new driven by the relentless drive to modernise: the inequalities a Marxist government can do nothing about the caste system and the despised status of the Untouchables, legally abolished but still at the root of the culture.

The symbol used to represent traditional India is the kathakali dancer, also the logo of the company owned by the family. They perform drastically cut down, popularised versions of their traditional dances telling stories from Hindu legend in the tourist hotels, working off the guilt they feel for the prostitution of their sacred art at the temples, while their children look for other careers more in tune with the times. This sad story encapsulates the message Roy has about the whole of traditional India: it is doomed, unable to survive in a country which wants to Westernise, become "modern".

Rudyard Kipling: Kim (1901)

Edition: Penguin, 1987
Review number: 69



Kipling's famous novel of British India, which made his name in the late nineteenth century, is still worth reading today. Kipling is rather out of favour today with the academic world; his work is routinely accused of racism. It's perhaps rather unfair to suggest this of Kipling; he was hardly as bad as many of the people of his own time, and Kim suggests considerable respect for many aspects of Indian culture.

Whatever else Kipling's book may be, it is certainly a good read, and was the prototype for many "ripping yarn" type stories. There is surprisingly little in the way of action when you think about it; Kim may become involved in spying, but he is hardly James Bond before his time.

There are certainly aspects to the story that have not endured so well. The odd remark strikes the reader as patronising (asides about the Oriental idea of efficiency and so on), and the idea that a white man could pass unnoticed through Indian society, even if brought up as though a native, is fairly absurd, as is pointed out in Edward Said's excellent introduction to this edition. (The introductions are one of the strongest points of the Penguin Classics series.)

One of the reasons Kim succeeds is because of the sympathetic treatment Kipling gives to the lama befriended and served by Kim. The lama is completely taken up with his quest for the river of healing, and is naive about the world while being extremely wise. His complex personality makes the comparatively sketchy nature of the other characters work well.