How do you top a Booker winner? With difficulty, one imagines. But, in Last Man in Tower, has Aravind Adiga
done his best with an impossible brief?
In the Guardian, Alex Clark argues that, while the novel ‘can tend slightly
towards the schematic’, it has a ‘broader and more forgiving feel than The White Tiger’, though Adiga’s ‘anger at the India he describes…remains
undimmed.’ The novel has ‘a gentler comic tone that finds affection as well as despair in poking fun at its characters’ pretensions and frailties.’ Overall, he presents
‘a picture that is as compelling as it is complex to decipher.’
Ceri Radford, in the Telegraph, finds Adiga’s
writing ‘rich and lush’, though argues that it is ‘lacking in subtlety’ on occasion. She also takes issue with some of the characterization. Ramu Puri, who has Down’s
Syndrome, is presented as ‘the idiot savant who whimpers every time someone turns on Masterji’, whereas ‘A lighter touch may have been more powerful.’ However, she admits
that the various stylistic and presentational faults can be pardoned when faced with ‘a writer who is so evocative, entertaining and angry.’
In the Independent on Sunday, Peter Carty contextualizes
the book against Adiga’s previous fiction, noting that ‘The brutal cynicism of Adiga’s previous work has been tempered here by an ambivalent acknowledgement of the benefits which
India’s rise is bringing to its growing middle class.’ He applauds the novels ambition ‘in the breadth of its subject matter’, and claims that ‘Adiga offers more
complexity’ in terms of characterization than in his Booker winner. As a whole, ‘Adiga lays out this most frenetic of megalopolises before us…as his writing takes an impressive
step onwards.’
James Purdon, in the Observer, sees the novel as ‘a timely parable for the
age of the property bubble and the vanity redevelopment project’, describing the character of Dharmen Shah (the property developer) as ‘An Ayn-Randish übermensch’. Elsewhere,
though, Adiga’s attempt ‘to squeeze meaning from every possible encounter and environment’ can become almost an ‘attempt to impose meaning’. But a canny symmetry
between structure and subject elicits Purdon’s approval, with the ‘unsettled’ structure being ‘well suited…to the febrile and shifting city it seeks to reclaim.’
Matthew Richardson
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