Every migrant, as Salman Rushdie has observed, is a fantasist. But so is every novelist. Both pursue dreams of another world, inside books or across borders – an affinity that has become central to the novel in our globalised era. If, in the 19th century with its nascent metropolises, the novelist’s preferred proxy was the flâneur loitering in arcades and observing urban fleshpots, today’s novelists, from Zadie Smith to Teju Cole, cannot resist identifying with the migrant, who sees the world through similarly fresh eyes.
The Indian writer Aravind Adiga’s new novel is firmly in this tradition. Set in Australia, where Adiga himself spent a few years finishing up high school (he remains a citizen), Amnesty tells the story of Danny, a Sri Lankan who has become an “illegal alien” after dropping out of his “ripoff” college. He is surprisingly content cleaning apartments in suburban Sydney when one of his clients is murdered by another. Over the next 24 hours, Danny contends with the dilemma of whether to risk deportation by informing the police.
His ambiguous status is of the moment, when so-called migrants are often really refugees and those we think of as refugees may simply be in search of a livelihood. Illegals might have arrived legally, while legitimate asylum seekers must enter illegally. Leaving behind his war-scarred, tsunami-ravaged Tamil homeland, Danny might himself be a refugee. But his asylum application was rejected, absurdly, because he had not been smuggled in. He came, instead, on a student visa, and overstays, for work and for love. Such are the complex motives and bureaucratic caprices that now characterise migration.
Amnesty lays bare Australia’s hypocrisies and contradictions. Immigration props up the economy yet is subject to the most draconian restrictions in the west – a region the country claims membership of against all geographic evidence. Society is so leerily insular that crowds cheer on sea patrols as they arrest incoming refugees. But in spite or maybe because of laws hellbent on preserving homogeneity, people are “famished” for the “belligerently weird … like a Tamil man with gold highlights in his hair”. Despite all efforts to the contrary, Australia is a melting pot, its allure felt in the ostentatiously multicultural epithets (“Japanese-Brazilian”, “vegan Vietnamese”) that Danny relishes.
Ever since his Booker-winning debut The White Tiger dovetailed the story of a homicidal businessman in India with a state visit by the Chinese premier, Adiga has often returned to his favourite motifs: enterprising desis (people from the Indian subcontinent), murder, the distorting effects of Chinese capital – all of which appear in Amnesty. The strength of his novels lies in their spirit of political inquiry, born of his years as Time’s Asia correspondent, uncovering hierarchies lost on the more typical literary novelist.
For example, Adiga understands the neoimperial divide-and-conquer relied on by Australian immigration enforcement. “Easiest thing in the world, becoming invisible to white people,” he writes, “but the hardest thing is becoming invisible to brown people.” He knows that nationality has no more zealous guardians than naturalised immigrants, eager to set themselves apart from their paperless peers. The plot turns on the threat of being “dobbed in” by an Indian with a coveted Australian passport.
Amnesty is a migrant’s-eye view of Australia, and Adiga conveys how migrants learn to read the signs of their strange new world and devise meaningful taxonomies for it. Suburban Sydney, for Danny, comprises two social classes: “thick bum” and “thin bum”, the obese poor who don’t hire cleaners and the salad-eating joggers who do. (This schema may sound familiar: in The White Tiger, the caste system was similarly bifurcated into “Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies”.)
These are acute sociological insights, but in terms of a novelist’s more traditional skillset, Adiga is a little lacking in psychological intuition or stylistic craft. One of the few metaphors in Amnesty does, however, capture something of the migrant’s pulsing paranoia, when zebra crossings converge in Danny’s mind to make the cityscape resemble the “tattooed war body of [a] hunter”. Danny isn’t the murderer, but will always be a fugitive.
Adiga unwisely burdens himself with a 24-hour structure, which is stymied by life’s inevitable mundanity. In Joyce’s Ulysses – progenitor of this form – or in recent works by others who have risen to the challenge, such as Amit Chaudhuri, the banal is burnished with an aesthetic charge. Amnesty strains for significance in its hourly accounting of Danny’s day, edging into the perfunctory or worse, the inane.
Novelists like to court praise for their naked powers of invention, but Adiga cites his sources in the acknowledgments, perhaps mindful of previous criticisms that he, an elite, Oxford-educated south Indian, had misrepresented north India’s rustbelt poor. The life of an illegal migrant is even more perilous terrain, as we saw with Jeanine Cummins’s widely condemned novel American Dirt. Some critics now insist writers should “stay in their lane”. But I’d prefer an amnesty – something Danny dreams of – for any artist who crosses the borders of expectation. Even Adiga’s flawed creation reminds us of the pleasure and understanding that can ensue when writers migrate out of their own experience.