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Amnesty by Aravind Adiga

All around the world, richer nations — whose foreign and economic policies have often, at least indirectly, been responsible for creating the dismal conditions that force people from developing countries to flee — are grappling with an influx of immigrants.

Australia is no exception. One of the richest countries in the world, its detention centers — Villawood and Christmas Island among them — are famous for their brutality.

Fear of ending up in such a detention center is what constitutes the dilemma at the center of Aravind Adiga’s new novel Amnesty. Danny is an undocumented man from Sri Lanka working as a cleaner in Sydney. When he gets news that a former client of his has been murdered, he has a sickening hunch who the murderer might be. Over the course of one day, Danny grapples with whether he should turn in the prospective murderer, a rich Indian-born Australian who knows Danny’s status, and risk deportation.

While the subject matter is serious, Adiga, whose 2007 debut The White Tiger won the Booker Prize, writes in a whimsical, somewhat irreverent style. Danny has plenty of observations to make about his adopted country: “Danny divided Sydney into two kinds of suburbs — thick bum, where the working class lived, ate badly, cleaned for themselves; and thin bum, where the fit and young people ate salads and jogged a lot but almost never cleaned their own homes.”

He’s particularly effective at calling out the class distinctions between Australian-born brown people, like the victim and the murderer, and people like Danny: “...the ostentatiously indifferent I’ve got nothing in common with you, mate glances of the Australian-born children of doctors in Mosman or Castle Hill (Icebox Indians Danny called them, because they always wore black glasses and never seemed to sweat, even in summer).”

Adiga is adept at bringing out the inherent absurdity of these distinctions — “Illegal means legal who is ill, no?” — and it’s the black comedy that lingers as the story races towards its inevitably bleak conclusion. Get your copy now. —Tomi Obaro