And Dharavi inherits the earth

As Vikas Swarup likes to point out, he isn’t Bengali and he didn’t go to St Stephen's, but nevertheless he's a civil servant with a best-selling novel and a six-figure advance. So much for the hype; how good is the book?
Q And A is the story of a young man, Ram Mohammed Thomas. Parentless, rootless and lacking any strong character traits apart from a good dose of survivor's instinct and a sharp mind, Ram/Mohammed/Thomas (he uses any of the names depending on the context in which he finds himself) is working as a waiter and living in Dharavi when he appears on and subsequently wins a quiz show called Who Will Win A Billion? only to find himself slapped with charges of cheating.
Cue the entry of a svelte, sympathetic lawyer called Smita, to whom Ram explains how he knew the quiz answers because of the chequered experiences of his short life.
Not bad, as a plot goes. This is important, since plot, or rather narrative, is Swarup's principal concern. He describes himself as a reader with little patience for descriptive writing. Here he shows that he is a writer without much interest in characterisation, or anything else that might impede narrative speed.
Event follows event, and, in the manner of fable or Hindi film, the hero careens between danger and miraculous escape.
Some of this means that snippets of scene-setting fact are clumsily worked in. For example, a catholic priest who looks after the young Ram is reminded.
“Don't you know, father, how strong the movement is against conversion in these parts? Several churches have been set fire to by irate mobs, who were led to believe that mass conversions to Christianity were taking place.” Don’t you know, Mr Swarup, that nobody actually talks like this?
The same (babu-like?) zeal for covering all bases leads Swarup to bring all of the following into the plot: chawl life and the morning queue for water; a horrific orphanage in Delhi; a villainous Malayali who captures small children and maims them before making them beg; a shifty Australian diplomat; an ageing Hindi film actress; an Agra prostitute.
“People haven't really written about the real urban India,” Swarup has said. But in the novel, perhaps because of its relatively one-dimensional characters, these inclusions tend to lack a sense of reality.
All the carping aside, Q And A is an enjoyable read. Compare it to Vernon God Little (also about the near-downfall of a young man caught in the grubbier margins of society) and it doesn't have that novel's verbal energy or black wit.
Compare it to Amitav Ghosh's Circle of Reason and it lacks that book's style or sweep of ideas (maybe there's something in those Stephanian Bongs after all).
What Q And A more resembles is a classic novel like Tom Jones or David Copperfield, in which the hero's innocence somehow remains intact through catastrophe and betrayal alike, sympathetic characters get their reward, all loose narrative ends are neatly tied up and the underdog really does inherit the earth.