A scathing, abusively satirical antidote to the romance of Rushdie

"Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, mobile phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore."

Balram is born in "a typical Indian village paradise", as he sarcastically calls it. He's the son of a rickshaw puller and he gets the soubriquet of the title when a school inspector declares him, as an intelligent boy "in this crowd of thugs and idiots", to be the rarest creature in the jungle. Balram becomes a driver and general dogsbody for a family of landlords. With them, he goes to Delhi and studies the ways of success, becoming enraged by his own enslavement. By murder and theft, he frees himself to become that symbol of new Indian prosperity, an entrepreneur, running a fleet of hire cars.

The White Tiger is a swift, amusing read, abusively satirical about every aspect of Indian life now, shown to be corrupt from top to bottom. It is the antidote to all those novels, from the likes of Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai, that remain at heart intoxicated with the romance of the subcontinent. The leitmotif here couldn't be simpler. "We all live in the world's greatest democracy. What a f****** joke."

Adiga compares life in India to a rooster coop in a meat market, where the birds wait helplessly for slaughter. "The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they're next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country."

How does the coop trap so many millions so effectively? The answer, says Balram, is "the Indian family". Only a freak - a White Tiger prepared to see his family "hunted, beaten, and burned alive by the masters" can break out of the coop.

The novel loses momentum and how Balram gets away with murder is never quite worked out. But there's real brio in its scathing presentation of the dirty realities of modern India: the servitude persisting underneath the "out-sourcing". If there's nothing here that comes as an actual surprise, it's still unfamiliar material, rudely delivered. Whether or not that makes this debut the best literary fiction of the year is another matter.