Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

Adiga restrains his colourful prose to the hardship of his material. The replication, in one of the better stories here, of the crucial event in The White Tiger – a drunken boss killing a pedestrian, bribing the judiciary and forcing a servant to take the rap – only reinforces this sense.Īfter Balram's vim there is surprisingly little comedy here. It is this overarching sense of purpose that seems most lacking from Adiga's melée of vibrant characters, and lends his novel the ambience of outtakes or supporting sketches for a work in progress. But McGregor bound his diffuse observations of discrete minor events into a cohesive whole. The overlapping lives in Between the Assassinations have some resonance with Shifts, Adam Thorpe's skilfully crafted collection of short stories that subtly unpicked a variety of occupations, as well as with Jon McGregor's intense debut If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things.

Following the zesty character of Balram and his wittily confessed moral adventuring with a slow-paced, impressionistic collage of linked stories is a courageous choice for that tricky second novel. This motive force is notably absent from Between the Assassinations, and is the principle detraction from an otherwise eloquent novel that is braced with pent-up fury and all the more disturbing for its lack of any vent or resolution. The protagonist of that novel, Balram, finds his righteous indignation at the brutally enforced servitude of Indian society hardening into a ruthless argument for murder. In The White Tiger, his rollicking debut that scooped the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Adiga fashioned this background outrage into a motive force for his snappy plot. These punitive lives steadily accumulate into a simmering outrage at the injustice of poverty and caste discrimination, both in principle and in muscle-knotted, exhausted, hungry, desperate reality.

Fired with anger and zealous to better himself, Chennaya toils away as a delivery-cart puller, but finds his humble career aspirations thwarted by venal employers. Keshava's story, of working his way up from street sleeper to bus conductor and the favour of the local kingpin before being abandoned after a work accident, is heavy with the casual brutality of indigent life.

Gradually, these ostensibly genial vignettes give way to darker stories in which Adiga's underlying theme of the corruption and injustice woven into the fabric of Indian society takes on a more menacing aspect.

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga