Lee Langley

Beyond the guidebook

issue 18 July 2009

Between the Assassinations is to summer reading what Slum-dog Millionaire was to feelgood movies: the book, like the film, beneath a deceptively beguiling surface, is a Dickensian-dark view of child labour, corruption, poverty, and ruthless privilege in modern India.

Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker prize with his first novel, The White Tiger, a savage picture of modern India seen through the eyes of a murderous entrepreneur hell-bent on power and success. Between the Assassinations sometimes reads like a prelude to that book: from the variously hopeless lives we encounter in these stories could have emerged the appalling yet dazzling anti-hero of Tiger. Set in Kittur, an imaginary everytown on the Malabar coast, the narratives are interleaved with deadpan excerpts from a ‘guidebook’: each a bland description of the neighbourhood where the subsequent story will be set — railway station, pornographic cinema, Jesuit school for boys and so on.

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