Almost great

Following our recent piece on the critical response to Aravind Adiga’s Last Man In Tower, here is the Book Blog’s review by Matthew Richardson.

Aravind Adiga’s new novel, Last Man in Tower, is ostensibly a book about Mumbai. It feeds from the sprawl and bustle of that maturing city, meditating on the riches of commercial development but, more compellingly, articulating its human cost.
 
The novel concentrates on the occupants of a ramshackle complex, Tower A of the Vishram Co-operative Housing Society. As part of a swathe of redevelopment, a goonish property tycoon, Dharmen Shah, offers the occupants a heady sum to vacate and allow him to mothball the place. He dreams in rhapsodic terms of transforming Mumbai into a new Shanghai.
 
Soon, of course, the monetary olive branch tempts almost all to agree to the proposal. Only one holds out. A mulish old science teacher, nicknamed Masterji, digs in his heels and rebuffs any attempt to forfeit his property. The central tension of the novel lies between the oily fatcat and the principled little man.
 
The whole thing has a faintly Dickensian ring to it (a near ubiquitous comparison: see Alex Clark, Ceri Radford and Peter Carty Indeed, Adiga slurps thirstily from the Victorian-realist rulebook. Mumbai is framed within the sort of sweeping, bulldoggish prose shunned by most contemporary British writers. Every microbe of the ‘acrid industrial stench’ is vividly evoked, as is the crush of people (we learn, for instance, that Masterji’s daughter was killed after being hustled out of a train carriage and left for dead on the tracks).
 
Yet the Dickens comparison is clumsy in some ways. There is little vampish comedy or larger-than-life wit (except, perhaps, a brief glimpse with a vaudevillian law firm, Parekh and Sons (a Pickwickian pair also diagnosed thus by Clark). Adiga arguably has more in common with Elizabeth Gaskell — that other amanuensis of Victorian industrialism. Needless to say, then, that Masterji is ploddingly worthy as a character. He plumps up his initial resistance to Shah’s offer by placing his struggle within a larger context: the poor versus the ‘free-market logic’ of the property mafioso. So there is lots of Gaskellian detail, the odd gobbet of social comment and a slightly pious breeze as Masterji’s social philosophy starts to enlarge.
 
But it is this very tension between referencing Dickens and Gaskell that explains the book’s weakness. It is neither a delicately spun morality tale, nor a pouchy romp full of comic riffs and exuberant character turns. None of the characters ever quite abandon script to speak in a unique voice. Instead, we have three hundred and fifty pages of narrative stalemate, as Masterji’s resistance is dissected at tedious length, before a cartoonish ending (think a below-par episode of Midsomer Murders) is bolted on to finish.
 
Of course, there are other points of interest. There is a rich depiction of Mumbai, a portrayal of the pressures it is under and a snapshot of the forces competing for space in the new India. Yet there is another, better novel buried within the padding: a slim, two-hundred page psychological tale about the subliminal effect money can have on a community. That subtle, almost Jamesian work, is squashed by a half-hearted attempt at comprehensiveness. What we get is too diabetic, grasping at the whirligig effect of Midnight’s Children yet without packing enough in the way of plot or drama. It is good, but an edit could have made it great.