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FictionBlog

Latest Reviews of Our Choice of Fiction Books

New and Notable: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

It was recently billed by The Sunday Times as a top holiday read and then it went on and won the Booker Prize . Give a big hand to Aravind Adiga and his timely debut novel The White Tiger: the tale of Balram Halwi, son of a tubercular rickshaw-puller, and his mysterious rise from grinding poverty - via murder to wealth - as told in a series of seven letters to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in advance of a state visit - as a way of explaining the truth about the new, prosperous India. It comes complete with caricatures of the rich, colourful and corrupt who make life on the Indian sub-continent such an intriguing pastiche, while seeking to expose the underbelly of life in a society where the author claims that the traditional and ancient caste system has now been replaced by just two castes - 'Men with 'Big Bellies; and 'Men with 'Small Bellies'.  

But how did Adviga, who began his working life as a journalist for the Financial Times, and later became the South East Aia correspondent for Time magazine pull off this prestigeous award? As he tells it in a recent interview on Bookbrowse.com, he wrote an initital draft of a novel in 2005, put it aside, and then re-wrote what finally became The White Tiger in late 2006 - after a trip to India when the country was riding high on a wave of economic prosperity - not exactly shared by all sectors of society. - or, as he puts it so succintly himself in the same interview - 'There is a kind of continuous murmur or growl beneath middle-class life in India, and this noise never gets recorded. Balram is what you'd hear if one day the drains and faucets in your house started talking.'

In giving the world The White Tiger, Adviga explains that the works of Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens in the nineteenth century did much to help England and France become better and fairer societies.

Hmm. So why not let India now benefit in this way in the twenty-first century? Jolly good idea we say!

The White Tiger is published in hardback by Atlantic Books (Mar 2008) 336 pages, ISBN:1843547201. List Price £12.99. Available new from Amazon at £6.49!

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Gently Ageing but Still Notable: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

In case we need reminding, some wag recently pointed out that George Orwell's classic Nineteen Eighty-Four was written as a warning and not as training manual  (no-names-no-pack drill ,but would several current members of Gordon Brown's Cabinet please take note). Now what could Orwell have been thinking about when he dreamed up this vision of a Dystopian society (i.e. one in which the populace is described as being generally miserable and which share common traits of negativity along with dangerous and undesirable elements) - and need we go any further dear reader?

Or how about buzzwords and phrases such as Newspeak, Telescreens, Doublethink, Altering Records! Does something sound familiar here? Well in case you've forgotten the trials and travails of Winston Smith as he toiled away in the Ministry of Truth, or if you never actually got around to reading Nineteen Eighty-Four as part of your rite-of-passage to maturity, then please note that good 'ol Penguin Classics have a 2004 edition out in paperback (352 pages) ISBN:014118776X List Price £8.99 - currently available from Waterstone for a mere £5.39! Click the link below more more on this and their other discounted titles.