Last Man in Tower sneers at the problems of living in the Third World

An unfortunate tendency among Indian writers who achieve recognition in the West is to crown themselves as the moral custodians of their country - sermonising against its inconsistencies and iniquities, while paying little attention to why so many Indians (yes, poor ones, too) actually love their country and feel great optimism for it.

After writing promising first novels, Arundhati Roy and Pankaj Mishra both abjured fiction to write hectoring undergraduate-standard political prose instead. Aravind Adiga, having won the Booker prize in 2008 for The White Tiger, has fallen prey to the same laziness that substitutes soap-box sanctimony for genuine enquiry and insight. Unlike Mishra and Roy, his need to preach has found expression in his novelistic career rather than distracting him from it, providing the fuel now for a third novel that does little more than sneer and linger over the problems of living in the Third World.

Last Man In Tower is set in contemporary Mumbai and concerns the relations between the residents of Tower A of the Vishram Housing Co-operative and an unscrupulous property developer who wants them all out so he can build a "new super-luxury residential project". The narrative is an obvious, cliché-ridden and over-long parable about the inequalities and corruption of India as its grows richer and its disparities starker. This may have worked well as a short story, a tenth of the length, but at more than 400 pages, it is a laborious and needless read.

The characters are, at best, two-dimensional. The hero is Masterji, a widowed Brahminical man of learning, whose "noble professional and dignified bearing" made him among the first Hindus allowed to live in what was built to be a residence for Catholics. One need know nothing more about him than that - so little is the attention paid to developing his complexity. Dharmen Shah, the property tycoon is, of course, selfish cruelty personified.

Adiga delineates people by their habits - what they like to read, how they negotiate their bad eyesight, their choice of hobbies - without exploring their interiors in the slightest. His method of characterisation is that of the Bollywood movie: simplistic, binary and cartoonish. And lacking a real story to tell, he falls back on that rich tradition in Indian fiction - which Arundhati Roy brought to its apotheosis in The God of Small Things - of packing his book with unnecessary descriptions of things that don't matter in the least and add no narrative drive whatsoever.

Masterji pines for his dead daughter, elbowed out of a moving commuter train, "brains oozing from her head" as she bled to death unaided on a rail track (oh, the cruel indifference of India!). He looks through her picture book and finds: "She had drawn the hibiscus plants that grew by the back of the compound, and the little spider's webs between their leaves, shiny and oval and gliding over one another like parallel Milky Ways ..." This description segues into a discussion of the philosophical differences between men and spiders.

Later, one finds the description of a "Pizzicati of intercepted raindrops dripped from a coconut palm: a virtuoso of brightness in the concert of thunderclouds, dense sky, thickening rain". Lush monsoon rain is yet another clichéd backdrop lending easy exoticism to an essentially boring novel. I can only imagine this appeals to Western matrons, who read this guff at bedtime before closing their eyes and dreaming of Art Malik. The book is full of it.

Anyone who really wants to understand India should resolutely ignore its over-hyped novelists and simply book a flight and explore the place for a while. They simply aren't up to scratch.