Atlantic Books, London, 2008.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize

It should have been a good day for little Balram Halwai, son of a rickshaw puller (“Mr. Vikram Halwai, if you please”) of Laxmangarh. He is promised a scholarship, a school uniform, and a glowing future. In a world filled with thugs and idiots, the school inspector tells him, a white tiger, the rarest of rare creatures, is born once in every generation. You are the white tiger.

But the very same day his family sells Balram to a tea-house owner to pay for his brother’s marriage. Instead of passively accepting his fate, Balram decides he is going to be a tiger and eat, not be eaten.

In this black comedy set in today’s India, Balram does indeed become a rich and famous “social entrepreneur” – once he murders his employer and makes off with the millions of rupees that were supposed to buy an election.

Aravind Adiga and the Epistolary Form

Like Mary Shelley in her own first novel, Aravind Adiga uses the epistolary form to tell the story of a 21st century Creature who makes it his destiny to track down and destroy his Creator, all the while keenly observing and commenting on the moral bankruptcy of his Mother Ganga.

In a series of letters to the Premier of China, Balram recounts his transformation from an honest boy growing up in the caste-ridden, impoverished, submissive “Darkness” — to a killer basking in the comforts of the Light.

A Biography of Balram

Born and raised in a tiny village controlled by the latest scions of four feudal landlord families — The Stork, The Buffalo, The Wild Boar, and The Raven — Balram eventually wheedles his way into a job as a chauffeur and is eventually taken to Delhi as a driver for Ashok, the Americanized son of one of the controlling families.

Strangely enough, Ashok is the most likable of the elite, at least until he shows that in a pinch he hasn’t the guts to stand by his so-called ideals. When push comes to shove, he is just like the rest of them. As the circumstances surrounding Ashrok’s murder are revealed, the reader feels it is less a tragedy than the result of implacable logic.

This is a remarkable debut novel on many levels. There are no sacred cows here. Adiga’s humor is biting; his tone is irreverent and iconoclastic, and his metaphors echo with a prophetic warning that extends far beyond the borders of India.

Lanark is a big book, not only in size (at 600 pages) but also in scope and ambition. Gray has stated he wished to write an epic of modern Scottish life, and took nearly 30 years to do so.

Lanark is structured in 4 books, although we start with Book 3. Gray has stated that “I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another.”

Lanark: Book 3

A man without a memory arrives in a dark labyrinthine city called Unthank where it is always night, he picks his name Lanark from a faded postcard on a wall, makes friends with a group of students and artists, but is overcome with alientation and angst and eventually developes ‘Dragonhide’ a disease which slowly covers his body with scales, starting with his arm. He is admitted to ‘The Institute’ for a cure, discovers horrifying facts about the diseases and the government and determines to escape.

Lanark: A Life, Books 1 & 2

Switch to a realistic wartime Glasgow, and are the story from the age of 5 of Duncan Thaw in a thinly disguised autobiography of Gray himself. Thaw grows up, loves art, goes to school at the Glasgow School of Art, is wracked by pain and the inability to love, creates a masterpiece painting the ceiling of a small scottish church, but eventually descends into madness and drowns himself.

Lanark Book 4

Book 4 is… different… Lanark finds his way back to Unthank, which is riven with violence and falling apart, a modern city in disintegration. But it also contains many surprises… in the Epilogue, which isn’t at the end of the book Larnark is confronted by the author himself, and has a conversation about the novel, it’s influences, aims, and how it should end. There are also extensive footnotes throughout and a Dictionary of Plagairisms where Gray notes the genesis, influence and effect of everything significant he has read on his own work.

In Summary Lanark is an amazing novel which carries you along with it’s own idiosyncratic brilliance and enriches your life for the better with it’s humour, thought and intelligence. Go beg buy or steal a copy and be changed by it.

In this 1930 classic book, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, the story is told as a stream of consciousness by the characters, who are family and friends of Addie Brunden. Addie’s family is attempting to return her body to Jefferson where she was born, but the bridge is out and they have no food or money for the trip. This leads to a series of unfortunate mishaps, arson, rape and eventually a new beginning for the family.

Addie’s husband, Anse, is portrayed as a lazy man that has relied on others to take care of him and who first asked Addie to marry him because he could not take care of himself. And she who accepted because she thought no one else would have her.

Five Children and Growing Pains

The woman’s five children, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, the only daughter, and Vardaman, each with their own brand of pain, caused by growing up in a household with a cold father and cheating mother, now have to do more than any child should ever be asked to do. Cash, being a skilled carpenter, works on his mother’s coffin for days, right outside her window so she can hear it being made and therefore won’t worry.

Faulkner’s tale pulls the reader into the story so that they may feel the mud on the side of the rivers edge and smell the rot of the decaying body, as this poor family attempts to return their mother to her hometown for burial. It reaches down into the darkest part of the human mind and attempts to give the reader an understanding of why people do the things they do and how they close their mind to it afterwards. How people can do cruel things to the ones that they love the deepest when they can no longer hold back their selfish desires and the same people can risk their own lives to show their love and pain.

This book was eventually made into a movie, known as “Camera Three.”