The White Tiger: A Novel by Aravind Adiga

My review

An excellent book and a worthy Booker winner - not to say that this isn't unevenly written, because it is, but the sheer power of teh narrative here, exposing a side of Indian life that is seen by every visitor but rarely understood or explored, is impressive.



Adiga manages the first three quarters of the narrative with bravura, if things fall apart towards the end, I feel it's because he wanted more time to live with his anti-hero protagonist and that, perhaps, this novel, written a decade later in Adiga's life, would have started in a very different place, covering less of a lifetime and dwelling deeper on salient points of experience.



There is an astonishing bravura word game played in the novel, which I won't give any spoilers about, or hints to, but the ridiculousness of the the term 'entrepreneur' when applied to any old business person is punctured with such a sure hand here that the book is worth reading for that alone.



And in light of Mumbai's recent horrific attacks, this book goes a long way to explaining why such terrorism happens, and why the 'West' is so reviled in some sections of society.






View all my reviews.

What a writer has to ponder

I’m sure Green Mountains Review is a great journal, and I hold no grudges for them rejecting my work but seriously, what were they thinking?

Who on earth thought that the way to deal with an International Reply Coupon was to sticky tape it to the front of the return envelope? And Gods below rain blessings the international mail service of two nations for taking such a generous view of the proceedings and not charging me a stiff sum for the pleasure of being turned down.

Life, sometimes you’ve got to laugh …

Writers wot I know

Well actually, writers wot I don’t know. I’ve never met Charles Lambert, but over the past couple of years I feel as if I’ve got to understand him a little, and share in his publishing journey, and it’s been a real pleasure to do both. His journey has taken a whirlwind, or Cyclone turn recently with the publication of his collection of short stories.

Charles is what I would call a serious writer, for two reasons. His material deals with serious issues (migration, sexuality, corruption in high places) and pays the reader the compliment of tackling the subject matter with sophistication – the kind of sophistication that doesn’t provide easy good/bad, black/white answers. Of course this sometimes means the reader has to do more work than they would if they chose a shallower or more polemical narrative, which is the second serious reason - but for those who believe the world is a complex place, and that understanding it is both a challenge and its own reward, Charles’s work is a real and lasting pleasure.

It’s no surprise to me that when I tried to find a ‘marker’ for the short stories in The Scent of Cinnamon, it was Henry James who came to mind. Charles’s novel, Little Monsters, also had the commitment to sensitivity and shading, and the slow remorseless building of dramatic inevitability that I find in The Turn of the Screw or The Portrait of a Lady. What these short stories all contain is a moment at which the story tips to un inescapable conclusion – and that moment is always the last possible moment at which we could begin that journey: the reader is never sure, until that point, what the destination will be, and after that point is absolutely certain that it couldn’t be anywhere else. So when I was invited to interrogate Charles about the way he writes, his subject matter, and what’s important to him in communicating with readers, I knew exactly what I wanted to ask:

Places are very important to your short stories – there are many events that could not happen except in one particular place and with one specific set of circumstances as is the case in Damage, which makes me wonder which comes first for you when you start to write: characters or locations?

Damage is just one example - there are others in the collection, including Toad and Entertaining Friends - of a story that doesn’t come so much from characters or locations as such, but from the whole bundle, from a lived situation. I’m fascinated by the way chunks of my own experience already seem to be stories, just waiting to be written down and crafted. Having said this, though, I was asked by Elizabeth Baines about autobiographical input last week, and it strikes me now that stories like these, despite being based on events I’ve been part of and contributed to, are autobiographical only in the most circumstantial sense. They’re less interested in me than they are in everything else, everything that isn’t me; they’re almost pretending I’m not there, except in an Isherwood-like ‘I am a camera’ sense.

To look at the question in another way, I’d say neither. Most of the stories start with a ‘what if?’ The Number Worm, for example, began with the idea of the worm, I think because I’d actually been bitten by something, and couldn’t work out what. It occurred to me that this might make a good basis for a story. After that I had to decide whose body would fall prey to the mysterious parasite, what that body would do with its life, where it would live and work, and so on. The main character was originally based on someone I knew and had just, in a sense, fallen out with, so there’s an element of petty revenge there, while his job as assistant editor for an oncology magazine is one that I did myself, many years ago and just as badly as my protagonist! Moving the Needle towards the Thread, on the other hand, was triggered by the idea of the photograph and the irony of its making, but I won’t say any more because I don’t want to spoil the story...

A lot of these tales could be described as psychological ghost stories, like those of Henry James who described his work as the “strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy” as in The Number Worm – is it important to you that the reader starts in a position of complete reality and moves slowly to a more disturbing version of the world? If so, what inspires this particular kind of eerie story?

Yes, it’s essential to any good ghost story, I think, that you start off feeling, if not cosy, at least in familiar surroundings. Fantasy and SF both need to get a sense of the other place established as quickly and convincingly as possible, but ghost stories and horror generally seem to me to work in the opposite way. The closer the story stays to what’s possible the better, I feel, and a quality of the most effectively creepy stories is that the props are reduced to an absolute minimum. My favourite ghost story writer – indeed, one of my favourite short story writers – isn’t Henry James, though I’m honoured by the comparison, but MR James and anyone who enjoys his work will know that a crumpled sheet or a bag with – oh horror! - arms are infinitely more terrifying, albeit less gut-wrenchingly gory, than the entire series of Saw.

What inspires these stories is an interesting question, with more than one answer. It can be very practical and, as a writer for specific markets yourself, Kay, you’ll know what I mean. The Number Worm and The Scent of Cinnamon were both written, in a sense, to order: the former for an excellent anthology called The Elastic Book of Numbers and the latter for the Daphne Du Maurier Short Story Competition some years back. I knew that the Elastic Press specialised in stories with an SF/fantasy edge, and that the Du Maurier competition wanted something in the spirit of Du Maurier, so in both cases I started with an agenda, almost a blueprint, and hoped the story would take me somewhere I hadn’t expected to go. I’ve spoken about The Number Worm above; with The Scent of Cinnamon all I knew was that I wanted the story to have a sense of heat and light, after which I waited for my ‘what if?’ to arrive. In other stories with an otherworldly element, such as Girlie, I started with the final image and had to find a way to reach it, and that’s also true of Nipples, which isn’t a ghost story – it’s just about as carnal as I go! – but does have a fairly disturbing climax.

And finally, do you write your stories sequentially or do you have several narratives on which you work simultaneously?

This is a really stimulating question, Kay – as are the others, of course! - because it’s made me think about the fact that, although I generally do work on one story at a time, this isn’t always the case. In this collection, for example, Damage and Air were written during the same period, and so were Entertaining Friends and Nipples. I don’t want to analyse the stories too much, but the former two certainly share, among other things, a concern with what the ‘good life’ might involve and where it might be found, while the second pair are both set in the same city and, indeed, bedroom, and wonder, in their various ways, about the nature of love. It wasn’t a case of writing a paragraph of one and then of the other - although I do remember occasions when both files were open - but of turning to one when I got stuck with the other, using one as an escape from the other or as a way of solving some problem in it, rather as we do when we use lateral thinking. The method was actually very productive and I don’t know why I don’t do it more often. Thanks to this question, Kay, I think I will!

And Charles is off on his cylone tour - next stop Scott Pack's blog 'Me and My Big Mouth' on 25 November. Be there or be ... wind-blown?

How to move on

This week I taught my last session for the two Brighton and Hove writing groups: The Hatchery and Comedy of Errors. It was lovely to spend a last hour with them, and then say goodbye.

But that reminded me of Alison. When I was eleven I wanted to be a ballerina (not a ballet dancer, note, a ballerina: prima or nothing!) so like half the other girls I knew, I took weekly dance lessons. I was, honestly, crap - a total dog's dinner of a dancer. Most of us were mediocre. But Allie was something else.

It wasn’t just that she danced well, it was that she was ferociously determined: she couldn’t bear not to get a step right, or not to understand the purpose behind a movement - she had everything we all lacked, poise, determination, talent, grit. She left our class after winning a scholarship to a ballet academy and essentially we never saw her again.

Many years later she contacted me, and we chatted back and forth on email about old times. She admitted that she’d chosen me, of all the group, because I’d given up ballet just before her own departure and she felt for that reason I was the one who would hate her least.

Hate her?

Yes, she said. Surely we all hated the way she’d succeeded and how she’d left us behind?

Nope. We’d loved it. We thought it was great that one of us had made it through and for years, I, for one, had read ballet programmes with fervour, hoping to find her name. I never did because she’d had one injury after another, until she’d been forced to stop dancing before reaching her mid twenties.

Well, she said, we’d probably all feel smug now, knowing she’d failed.

Smug? I was devastated to think that her talent and hard work had never been rewarded.

Any profession is competitive and Allie was projecting onto her old friends the neuroses and bitchery of her ballet school companions. But at our weekly ballet sessions we’d all known she was a different category to us, we weren’t jealous because she worked so bloody hard, and we couldn’t be arsed to even try. We’d championed her as much as we could, but she couldn’t see past her own belief that she’d betrayed us somehow, that in exceeding us she’d put us down, and eventually we lost touch for a second time, because I just couldn’t cope with her mithering on about how much I must loathe her, really.

What’s that got to do with writing? Well, looking around the room on Saturday, I noted which writers had moved on from the groups already. Some had gone because group writing turned out not to be for them. Some had gone because writing, pure and simple, turned out to be too much like hard work. One, at least, had gone because the group wasn’t structured enough to suit her, and another had moved on to writing something so outré that no writing group could possibly help him. For their different reasons, for their personal needs and desires, they’d moved on.

And that’s good – sometimes moving on is what you need to do, and you should never, ever, feel bad about those you leave behind – because most of the time they are cheering for you, whether you hear it or not.

Ballerina courtesy of x-eyedblonde at Flickr

Could a writer get away with this scenario?

Here’s the synopsis. A sea eagle and a buzzard are found dead. The police investigate and discover over 30 pieces of poisoned meat and a dead hare sprinkled with poison on a pair of Scottish estates. Backstory: the sea eagle was hatched as part of a government-funded reintroduction programme – its distinctive tags led the person who found its body to tell the RSPB, who in turn told the police. Police procedural element: during the police search a dead buzzard was found, only yards from the eagle, and the hare’s poisoned carcass was only yards away from both. A fingertip search then discovers the neatly cut and poisoned cubes of deer meat. Conflict element: the millionaire owner of one of the two estates had already lost a substantial amount of his EU farming subsidies after the police discovered poisoned meat in his employees vehicles earlier in the year. But he says it’s nothing to do with him.

Well, what’s the motive? Perhaps this man with millions can’t spare a beautiful bird of prey a couple of fish or perhaps, as he claims, he’s completely innocent. It’s one of those occasions where I can’t help feeling that a fiction writer wouldn’t be allowed to get away with such a scenario because everybody would say it was just so petty for a rich man to kill a predator out of spite. Quite true, most rich men who kill predators do it for ‘sport’. On balance I think I prefer the poison approach, although ideally I’d like the eagle and buzzard to be left alone to live their glorious lives which are naturally quite perilous enough. And no, I’m not thinking of writing about it, but I hope those responsible get their legal and poetic desserts.

Oh, and the bit that would stop the novel getting published? Not any of the above, but that the rich man’s profession is banking – surely too much of a cliché to get past any slush pile reader!

Beautiful Norwegian Sea Eagle courtesy of Maltesen at Flickr

Writing, writers and humbleness

I’m going to start by sending you off! Please go and read Fiona’s excellent account of why it’s sometimes important to spend more than necessary – it’s here: Cottage Smallholder.

Okay, so what have Tesco’s mushrooms got to do with frugal writers? Very simply, sometimes making the investment in your writing is what you need to kick your own backside to the next level.

As an example, I used to write in any old shorthand pad or notebook. Then, one day, I found myself talking to a BIG agent (not my agent) in a bar, and the BIG agent actually leaned over and plucked my crappy old shorthand pad (Asda, 79 pence) from my bag. Between awe and horror and a certain sense of paralysis that came from the invasion of my personal space, I saw bits of scrap paper, old bus tickets and other impedimenta fall from the notebook's pages onto the pub floor. Needless to say, I was humiliated, even though the BIG agent claimed to enjoy what he read in my truly awful handwriting.

Nowadays I write in Moleskines - the ones with a pocket at the back for scrap paper. I would never have bought one if the BIG agent hadn’t shamed me into it, but because I have one, and it’s expensive and lovely, I feel compelled to make use of it every day. And because of that compulsion do write just about every day, and because I write every day, I have far more work to send out than most writers I know. And because I send the work out, I have just torn the cellophane off my fourth moleskine, having filled three in the past year. And having paid for them from my writing income, of course!

Sometimes the spur you need is to invest in yourself, and then live up to your investment, whether it’s a course, a notebook, a special pen or just printing some business cards that say ‘writer’ and handing them out.

Moleskines courtesy of culture.culte

Burlesque – more fun than sex?

Well no, not exactly, but definitely a lot of fun. I’ve never read as Carmel before and probably never will again, but this was the best of good causes: Burlesque Against Breast Cancer, with all the proceeds going to charity. The anthology is Ultimate Burlesque if the comments below make you want to invest in a copy – and why not

Of course I was stupidly nervous (wouldn’t you have been, dear reader?) which is standard procedure for me when reading. I only threw up four times before the event, which is an improvement, and didn’t get a migraine until afterwards, which is a definite forward step. I am still unable to understand why I get so nervous – mind you, Jessica Lange still has such bad first night nerves that she describes them as ‘absolute dread’, so perhaps I should just remember I’m in good company. And when I get there, I love what I’m doing. Always and ever I’m a bit overwhelmed that people pay good money to hear me, and console myself with the thought that there are other readers who are definitely value for money on the bill. On Thursday it was Emily Dubberly who read a full-on sex story and Kristina Lloyd who read the first half of a surreal sex romp set in an administratively hide-bound circus – believe me, Kristina’s story alone is worth the anthology purchase price.

And I read a bit of The Price of Freedom a story set on Victory in Japan Day 1945. I got two laughs, which made me happy, as they were in the right places, and I didn’t drop anything, dry up, throw up or walk out. In fact I was euphoric after the reading and had I not had to walk back to the car in ridiculously high heels, which gave me bleeding toes, I’d still be walking on clouds now.

Many thanks to all who came along, it was lovely to see so many faces I already knew, and I hope you enjoyed yourselves. In the picture you can see, left to right: the back of my head with new ultra-short haircut and those insane heels, Emily Dubberly in the centre and Kristina Lloyd on the right.