Aravind Adiga's novel was already sitting on the shelf. Which made it a convenient choice given that I was looking for something breezy to offset Pale Fire. It's the thoroughly entertaining story of an Indian servant who escapes the "chicken coop" of poverty by breaking all the rules and offing his master. Along the way it gives Adiga plenty of room to reflect on what perpetuates the dramatic corruption and inequality of India. While I enjoyed the story and generally enjoyed the writing as well, I think the fact that it won the Man Booker prize has more to do with politics than art. Perhaps that's true of all prizes though? Adiga's most interesting literary device is setting the story in the form of a letter from the protagonist to Wen Jiaboa. So technically, I guess it's an epistolary novel. But of course this also allows him to slip in a question that the West considers truly subversive: what's so great about democracy? And from that ironic distance, he's able to give us a classic suspense story in the sense of Hitchcock: the audience already knows what's going to happen, but they are as clueless as the characters about exactly when and how the ax will fall. While it was enjoyable, you're not missing much by just watching the Netflix adaptation.
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