Boyd Tonkin: A beguiling tale that speaks volumes about our predicament

The Mumbai stock market may have been plunging over recent days, but in the global marketplace for fiction the mantra of "Invest in India" remains a safe long-term bet. Only two years after Kiran Desai took the prize for The Inheritance of Loss, Aravind Adiga last night confirmed that subcontinental stories have a peculiar power to seduce Man Booker judges. This time, headlines will suggest, things have changed. With its beguiling but sinister first-person tale of the ascent of driver-turned-entrepreneur Balram out of the "darkness" of village life and into the glamour of boom-time India, The White Tiger is said to have broken the mould that saw foreign honours go to exotic fictions of a colourful but fanciful land.

Up to a point. True, the novel bristles with modernity. It captures the thrills and drawbacks of a rapid social rise in a time of shrivelling traditions and ballooning ambitions. Last night, Man Booker director Ion Trewin told me the judges thought "You could not have more of a book for our present predicament" than this one. As nouveaux riches across the world forfeit their assets and their status, this tale of vaulting,Macbeth-like aspiration and its downside reads like a sign of troubled times. And yet... The White Tiger still belongs firmly in the Indian grain of world-conquering fiction. Inevitably, the shade of Salman Rushdie hangs over it. Adiga, however, quickens his pace and focuses his insight in a way the sprawling deltas of modern Indian fiction seldom manage. All the same, there's something bewitchingly traditional in the structure of these letters sent to a distant recipient: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, whom Balram embraces as an unknown ally. These "nights" with their secrets, confessions and surprises, humour and shocking blows of fate also recall the 1001 Nights, whose yarns often originated in India. This is a contemporary tale of greed, money, self-transformation and the violence that underlies social upheaval. Yet it deploys the traditional storyteller's ruses and disguises. That Indian truism about the nation as a shotgun marriage of ancient and ultra-modern may have bags of literary life left in it.

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Boyd Tonkin is Literary Editor for the Independent