February 28, 2009
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga is a great book. Adiga grabbed my attention right away in the first memo from our narrator to the premier of China and I was hooked for the duration. Adinga tells the horribly compelling story of this Munna ("boy") renamed Balram and then renamed again as The White Tiger. The writer is so patient, so disciplined, as he builds the narrator before us, and his family, and the world of his youth -- what misery -- and then adds on year after year of his life -- more misery -- letting time and events move him and change him and push him to the inevitable. And yet despite the inevitability -- we know a murder is coming -- the story becomes edge-of-seat unbearable in its unpredictability: when will the murder happen? And why?
The "why" is quite simply, India. Because our narrator is an Indian, born poor and chained to a destiny of servitude, in a country of hypocrisy and corruption and poverty. Adiga's novel works brilliantly on so many levels to gut-punch us with the misery of Balram's life, the enormity of what he must overcome, and the immensity of what he must do to free himself from the "rooster coop", as he calls it, of his caste and his place in life.
First, the novel works as great story-telling: Adiga keeps us fully engaged from the get-go as we are fed, chapter by chapter, Balram's life, told in memos written over a course of seven nights. Adiga is a master at giving great details of the present and creating suspense for the future: we have a hint of what is coming but the story unwinds in such twists of fortune and fate that we are dying to know more, to understand it all. This is a book that holds you to the end and keeps you thinking about it after it is over.
Second, the novel is a great story: a boy born in seemingly inescapable poverty, escapes. He is Dickensian in his attributes of birth and circumstance (he is Pip, he is David Copperfield, he is Tiny Tim), but he is Machiavellian in his mode of escape. All concepts used to control and contain --duty, loyalty, honor, family -- he will turn to his own advantage to secure his freedom.
Third, the writer is a genius of narration. Adiga uses the voice of a man embedded in the Indian social, economic, and financial system to tell us about the misery the system imparts. The details of his life are not told sentimentally, or patronizingly or with any kind of pity, which would have been necessary -- pity is, after all, called for, by the bucketful -- if another narrative voice had been used. Much, much worse, Balram tells the story of his India as fact, as set in stone, as unchangeable. He also tells his story with humor -- this is not a grim book. Balram is outraged by the impoverishments of his life not because they exist (he is not surprised but rather accepts the filthy water, horrible food, inadequate education, crummy housing, slave labor, and fixed elections) but he is outraged by the hypocrisy that surrounds all these facts of his life.
The exposure of that hypocrisy is the fourth brilliant aspect of this novel. Nothing is what the rich and powerful call it, and the concepts of high morality -- duty and honor and loyalty -- are used only for the purpose of crowd control, they have no meaning beyond a weapon wielded by the powerful. This is a novel about the deconstruction of words --about how words have no intrinsic meaning at all. Balram is told by his government that his village has electricity, he knows it does not, and that he has lunch in school but he knows that the school master pockets the money and the boys get nothing to eat. He is told by his family -- by his awful granny -- that the family is his support system, that she stuffed him with sweets as a child and now he owes her -- but he knows that his family is a succubus willing to eat alive any of its members for the sake of the snaking whole (and his granny never gave him a sweet in his life). Balram knows that the concepts of "duty" and "honor" are con jobs, scams created to keep servants in their place and to preserve the powerful. We listen as Balram tells how he came to realize the truth about all these words and what it so deeply moving is that even as both we and he understand the falsity and the dangerous power of these words and concepts, we also see that they are so deeply engrained in his consciousness that for him to turn his back on them -- to twist them around again for his own use -- is extremely painful, a literal wounding of his psyche. But he does it, he self-mutilates, so he can be free. Balram turns his back on his family and redefines duty and honor as to himself and to the vision his dead mother had for him: to rise out of the darkness, out of the black, sucking mud of poverty and into a place of light.
The middle and upper classes of India are portrayed as bullies and thugs, even the ones who leave to be educated in the United States and then return. They are as mired in the system as the lower castes but for them it is a prison of luxury. Hard to feel sorry for them, but at times, we do. Because the narrator does too. And if he can pity them, we must.
There is a strange optimism in this book, a turning upside down of the notion that anything is possible (a slogan of one of the hypocritical political parties of the novel): yes, anything is possible, if a person is willing to sacrifice anything for the change sought. But the change should not be so hard to make, so terrible to win, so horrible to acquire.
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