A fter an “emotionally draining” and closely fought final judging session, Aravind Adiga, one of the two debut novelists on the Man Booker shortlist, was on Tuesday night awarded the US$87,000 prize for The White Tiger, a bracingly modern novel about the dark side of the new India.
Adiga, 33, is a surprise winner: at long odds he batted aside the claims of veteran writers on the shortlist such as Sebastian Barry and Amitav Ghosh.
He is only the third first-time novelist to win the Man Booker — after Arundhati Roy in 1997 and DBC Pierre in 2003 — and he is the second youngest after Ben Okri, who won in 1991 aged 32.
Michael Portillo, the chair of the judges, talked of a final panel meeting characterized by “passionate debate.” Adiga’s book won by a “sufficient,” but by no means unanimous, margin.
“It was pretty close,” said Portillo, and in the last stages it was down to a battle between The White Tiger and one other book.
The White Tiger takes a sharp and unblinking look at the reality of India’s economic miracle. Its antihero and narrator, Balram Halwai, is a cocksure, uneducated young man, the son of an impoverished rickshaw driver. By lying, betraying and using his sharp intelligence, Balram makes his ascent into the heady heights of Bangalore’s big business.
Portillo said that Adiga “undertakes an extraordinary task — he gains and holds the attention of the reader for a hero who is a thoroughgoing villain.”
He also praised the work’s attention to “important social issues — the division between rich and poor, and issues on a global scale. And it is extremely readable.” The main criterion for the prize, he said, was: “Does this book knock my socks off? And this did.”
‘THE MOST COMPULSIVE BOOKER WINNER FOR YEARS’
The feeling among the judges, Portillo said, was that “here was a book on the cutting edge, dealing with a different aspect of India, unfamiliar perhaps to many readers.
“What set it apart was its originality. The feeling was that this was new territory.”
Portillo likened the novel to Macbeth. “It is about ambition realized through murder,” he said, “but with a delicious twist. Whereas Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are driven mad by their crime, the hero of this book is only driven mad by the fact that he hesitated and might not have committed his crime.”
The novel takes the form of seven letters addressed by Balram to the Chinese premier on the eve of a state visit, and its tone is almost Dickensian, as the unpleasant reality of contemporary Indian society is revealed via mordant sketches of characters from millionaires in their air-conditioned tower blocks to the unfortunates who are trapped in poverty and who live literally below them, catering to their every whim.
Beryl Bainbridge, reviewing the book for the Guardian, called it “a witty parable of India’s changing society.”
Adiga was born in Chennai in 1974 and was raised partly in Australia. Having studied at Columbia and Oxford universities, he became a journalist, and has written for Time magazine and many British newspapers. He lives in Mumbai.
Jonathan Ruppin, of the London book shop Foyles, said: “This is a refreshingly unromanticized portrait of India, showing that a vast gulf between rich and poor is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. It’s a very exciting winner for bookshops as it’s so commercial. It could prove as popular as The Life of Pi, the Booker’s best-selling winner.”
Janine Cook, fiction buyer at rival Waterstones, said: “Some of the biggest-selling Booker victors have come from India, and this is one of the most compulsive Booker winners for years. It’s an amazing debut that has already done incredibly well for us, but will now move to a higher level altogether.”
The other authors on the shortlist were Philip Hensher for The Northern Clemency, Steve Toltz for A Fraction of the Whole, and Linda Grant for The Clothes on Their Backs.
The other judges were Alex Clark, critic and editor of Granta; the novelist Louise Doughty; James Heneage, the founder of Ottakar’s bookshops; and Hardeep Singh Kohli, the broadcaster.
Last year’s winner of the Booker prize was The Gathering by Anne Enright, which has now sold more than half a million copies in UK, Ireland and the Commonwealth.
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