John Thieme
‘What Do You Want?’
Like his Man Booker-winning The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower takes a sardonic look at the human consequences of the materialism that has fuelled India’s economic boom. Adiga’s fiction interprets the ‘new’ India for the West and, like Danny Boyle’s more sentimental Slumdog Millionaire and the fiction of Rohinton Mistry, particularly A Fine Balance, the novel exposes some of the harsher realities of Mumbai society. It has much in common with Mistry’s first two books, which, like Last Man, centred their action on the residents of a building.
In Mistry’s case, the occupants of the buildings were members of the Parsi community in which he grew up. Adiga’s perspective is altogether more contemporary and the communal range is much wider. The building in question is Vikram Society, Tower A, located near the city’s Santa Cruz Airport,
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