Between the Assassinations

The timing behind the publication of Aravind Adiga’s Between the Assassinations appears almost perfect. Last year, he gained notoriety when he won the Booker Prize for his excellent first novel, The White Tiger, the story of a house servant in Delhi who decides that upward mobility means murdering his boss. And now, in the midst of Slumdog fever, interest in the gritty underbelly of India—the milieu of Assassinations—is at an all-time high.

But the book, a collection of short stories centered around the Indian city of Kittur, doesn’t quite hit its mark. Billed as a “prelude” to The White Tiger, it instead feels like a dry run for that more mature work. Bookended by the assassinations of Indira Gandhi (1984) and Rajiv Gandhi (1991), these stories give us Kittur from the point of view of idealistic journalists, underpaid bus conductors, Communist party stalwarts, horny schoolboys and beaten-down servants. But without the focus and character development of The White Tiger, this all starts to read like a litany of oppressor and the oppressed. It’s sad to read about delivery boys who bicycle heavy loads for a few pitiful rupees, but most people don’t need convincing that thankless work undertaken in a fundamentally unjust society can be a real drag.

Adiga previously worked as a journalist for Time, and that’s evident here—the stories, with their utilitarian prose, are essentially reported vignettes. Still, the surfeit of detail doesn’t lead to any sort of emotional payoff. The White Tiger was thrilling because it took Adiga’s concerns with caste rage and Indian tradition and wove them into an entertainingly perverse story of murder for personal gain. Without the benefit of such a unique central narrative, Between comes across like a succession of random postcards from the edge.—Scott Indrisek

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