SUBVERSE: A shadowy beast

So Indian exuberance has trumped Irish dolour. But not in the way one expected. Aravind Adiga's debut novel, 'The White Tiger', defying the built-in temptation to go for the 'big' book, has won the Man Booker prize.
It comes as a huge disappointment not only to the pundits but also to those who, on their own volition, trawled the six shortlisted books and had their senses scrambled in the process.But the warning signs were there all along.
The smart money, initially at least, was on the two heavyweights, Amitav Ghosh and the Irishman Sebastian Barry, whose Ur-books with their Joycean ambition show the imagination to be immoral, but whose lack is also the source of all evil. Adiga's book, in contrast, has a go-for-broke intensity, is hyperbolic, often funny, loquacious at times, and scabrous and scatological in equal measure. But unlike 'Sea of Poppies' or 'The Secret Scripture', the skin between ordinary life and story, between the mundane and mythical, is hardly permeable.
But then Michael Portillo, chair of the Booker judges, had sort of loaded the dice right at the beginning of the judging process with his pronouncements about page-turners taking the cake. Given that the serious novel is in danger of becoming a boutique item, the Booker prize has a stated and, on the face of it, unconscionable aim. Each year, a set of novels are roped off by an intellectual oligarchy in the hope that these books would attract the attention of a wider body of readers, who otherwise wouldn't be aware of, let alone read them.
There is an implicit balancing act involved here. The prize, as custodian of the canon, has to ensure that the serious reader doesn't feel betrayed by the books that are selected. At the same time, it has to demystify literature enough to convince the devourer of 'airport books' that reading a Booker shortlisted work is not akin to watching the paint dry. This has been the trend ever since Man Group plc became a partner in the prize in 2002, bringing in sorely lacking market savvy, and a non-literary celebrity was made part of the jury.
The six shortlisted books this time largely reflected the new trend, and are an eclectic mix of the monumental and local - on the one hand, grand synthesising narratives on subjects that guarantee largeness and importance, and on the other, those that are deliberately dispersed, diffident, demotic and traffic in irony. What they have in common, though, is that they all assume a cultural burden.
Tiger is the exception to this mix. It's diffident certainly, in both theme and tone. But the most disappointing thing about Adiga is that he always performs with a net. Though he ostensibly writes about India's huge disenfranchised the voice of the main protagonist Balram Halwai, in Tiger, is "what you'd hear if one day the drains and faucets in your house started talking" he risks nothing when it comes to emotions or his character's inner life.
Both Barry and Ghosh are so different in this respect. Scripture, which recovers a sort of lay and neglected Irish history, concerns itself with memory and mortality, of how we all, in the very midst of life, are imperceptibly dying on our feet, and how self-desertion can often do greater damage to an individual than self-abuse.
Ghosh, like Melville, has in Poppies, a tale of the weed and how its commercial exploitation presaged the global village by binding together diverse destinies, has been able to wed meditation to water, and like how a ripple will smash a reflection into an abstract of fragmentary images, the writer has transformed events in the water itself into constituent elements of the novel's design.
Adiga hardly seems to have such an appetite or ambition. But then these are times when culture, and being cultured, isn't cohesive anymore and where tastes reflect the 'whether apple or orange' conundrum. Adiga's win is as much a recognition of how ecumenical English has become, as it is a reminder of just as how differently writers write, and more importantly, how differently readers read.