Review: "Last Man in Tower" by Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga, whose first novel, the insanely great The White Tiger, introduced a view of modern India unlike any of his fellow countrymen have been able to create in a fictional world. While writers like Rushdie and Ghosh have presented an India that is full of flawed magic, The White Tiger created a sociopathic character study of an amoral man in an India where bad people can prosper and good people victimized, all depending on social standing or financial situations. If you put a smarter and more sophisticated Francie Brady from The Butcher Boy into Slumdog Millionaire, you’d get something as compelling and disturbing as The White Tiger. It was a refreshing take on a place that for so long had this mystical veneer covering it, and this novel completely ripped it off, exposing the festering sores that greed and need for success has done to the country. His second book, the short story collection, Between the Assassinations, brought ups some of the same problems with modern India that The White Tiger brought to the surface, but it lacked a the narrative power of his debut work, and the people that populated his fictional town failed to be anything more than representations of social and political strife, and did not become something real and dangerous, the way Balram Halwai became at the end of The white Tiger. But here, in his new novel, Last Man in Tower, we see a return to the kind of powerhouse storytelling that made Adiga so famous to begin with. Playing out like a painfully realistic version of The Twilight Zone’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, it shows how a society with so little can become cancerous when even a morsel of the life they have always dreamed of is offered to them. The setting is a decrepit housing development known as Vishram Society. It has leaky pipes, terrible plumbing, and is in constant threat of tsunamis, but there is a community there that goes beyond monetary needs. Then Shah comes into the picture, a ruthless land developer hell bent on tearing the building down to build a luxury apartment complex. He offers them an insane amount of money for the giving up of he is nothing but a carpetbagger, and Masterjii, a retired teacher who refuses to give, sees this immediately, and refuses to budge. Tempers flare, things are said and done that cannot be taken back, and it all leads to a terrible end for all involved that will leave you gasping. The real horror here is how people we know and love and see as simple and honorable can become rotten and reprehensible when a dream collapses, and Adiga charts this in very vivid detail, the change happening quickly and almost unnoticeably, making the things they do shocking, but not out of the ordinary. Sometimes dreams of few and of one collide violently, and in a place like Adiga’s Mumbai, treachery and resulting depravity have never been so eloquently rendered.

Rating: 5/5