White Album / Wash / Lie / House

Aravind Adiga is a graduate of Oxford and Columbia universities and writes business journalism for Time magazine. In this Man Booker long list 2008 finalist novel the notion of The White Tiger - a rare and beautiful event - is used to characterise the transition of a young man in India from 'the Darkness' to the light - from empty belly to full belly. The metaphor is flawed - the white tiger is not a rare endangered species, but a genetic misfit bred for profit. According to Adiga the transition to wealth is best accomplished by sacrificing family (quite literally) loyalty and morality. Many Indians of my acquaintance would take a different view. But for those of us who travel to India, and are assigned a driver who sits in the car and waits, this novel certainly provides a sobering pause for thought.

Lovely Linda

Here's a delectable novel for lovers of London, particularly those mysterious mansion blocks just west of the Marylebone High Street. Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs teems with the spirit of place - and time too, the glorious seventies and the rich variety of costumes which went with them. The story concerns the gradual self discovery, through the vicissitudes of life, of the only child of elderly Hungarian refugees. Through her eyes we enter the exotic private world of a notorious slum landlord - her long lost uncle. And learn that European affluence also often conceals a bleak and tortured history. Surprise surprise, things are seldom what they seem. Love and splendor are not the sole province of the beautiful people. In short, then, another strong contender for the Man Booker prize - what a marvellous long list we are enjoying this time round.

The Lost Narrative

The first half of this 2008 Booker long list contender is engrossing, moving and strong, with a beguiling richness of story-telling and achingly lovely prose. Then Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog seems to get rather lost in the Aussie scrub itself. The tropes, the scenes even the authorial voice become repetitive: they tell us nothing new. The reader starts to skip impatiently forward. Interesting characters are introduced then fade puzzlingly into the background. Stasis threatens. From the simple yet crucial perspective of plot, too much remains unresolved, the mother and her failing body, the art gallery owner and his sexual ambiguity, the son and his disputed parenthood, and most of all, the missing millionaire husband, who surely is the real 'lost dog' of the title. Will he too come crawling back bruised and starved, but still wagging his tail? (...or, perhaps, wearing that little black dress?)

Zia zia piano piano

So it goes: first book very good, second book very bad. Well, just plain awful actually. Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes essays a fictional account of an actual event - the assassination of the deeply unpleasant President Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan on August 17th 1988. It shares something of the manic, riotous, image-laden quality so often evident in writing from the sub-continent, from Rushdie through Arundhati Roy to last year's Animal's People, but here applied with what my mother would call 'a nasty streak'. Every character is venal, self-obsessed and corrupt, and they all suffer various repulsive humiliations before meeting sticky, unpleasant ends. You finish the novel feeling as if you've supped on carrion. Haven't been to Pakistan, but it's hard to believe that any place on earth is as bleakly unpleasant and unredeemable as Hanif's fictionalised homeland.

We of the Nether Nether

Well well well, what a surprise, a veritable bobby-dazzler for the first station of the cross in this year's Bookerathon - Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. Just my favorite sort of novel is all, a sweet murder mystery love story covering off New York, London, big business, cricket, cooking, cute lawyers, 9/11, Eros, Google Earth, the Chelsea hotel, the odd angel, and all of it neatly packaged in a dreamy, stylish first person narrative with plenty of purple patches. So good it's tempting to give O'Neill my personal Booker here and now and skip the rest, but for one slight problem - we never get to learn whodunnit. That may be just one genre transgression too many. Or have I missed a crucial subtext?