Title: The White Tiger
Author: Adiga, Aravind
Published by: Harper Collins, India
Year: 2008
Date reviewed: 09.11
ISBN: 978-81-7223-745-5

I regret to say that I don’t think this book is worthy of the Man Booker prize it won in 2008. I can only think it superficially ticked enough boxes to persuade the judges – first novel, non-white, non-English author, disadvantaged first-person narrator, and presenting a picture of India at odds with the favoured Western view of a dynamic emerging economy seen through a Bollywood lens. Adiga’s India is uniformly greedy, corrupt and violent with no redeeming features.

But that’s not why I don’t like it. The trouble is, the book’s badly written. There’s not a single rounded character in it – they are all one-dimensional shadow-puppets. So there is no-one for the reader to relate to: it’s hard even to start to care what happens to any of them. Granted, the climax of the book (a murder) is well trailed so there is some incentive to keep reading, but that’s about all.

As I read I wondered whether I was being too harsh. After all, it’s not easy to write a novel in the first person. But then I remembered how well Ishiguro does it in Remains of the Day, An Artist of the Floating World, or When we were Orphans – and more recently Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. White Tiger just isn’t in the same league.