Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker prize last year for his first novel,The White Tiger, which brilliantly exposed the inhuman attitudes of India’s wealthy elite. After such a triumphant debut, his second novel inevitably comes weighted with expectations and his subject matter — startling inequalities of wealth, the caste system, the despair of the poor — explores similar territory. The novel’s title suggests that something is profoundly wrong in India, reminding readers that two of its leaders have been murdered in recent memory.

The novel is set between 1984, when the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated, and 1991, when her son Rajiv met the same fate. In some senses it doesn’t matter, for the country that Adiga describes is an amalgam of reality and fiction and it isn’t as if much has changed since the 1990s. For the purposes of the new novel Adiga has invented a city called Kittur, which lies on the southwest coast, south of Goa and north of Calicut.

Where his first novel was structured as a series of letters to the Chinese leader, this one is framed as a travel guide in which the city’s “official” history contrasts with the stories he tells about its inhabitants. In his travel-writer guise, Adiga praises the religious diversity and scenic beauty of Kittur, archly informing readers that “a minimum stay of a week is recommended”.

What he then offers is a detailed itinerary, starting on day one at the railway station — “dim, dirty, and littered with discarded lunch bags” — and ending a week later in Salt Market Village. Apparently the best time to visit this mostly rural area is April or May for the nocturnal “rat hunt” when women march through the fields with flaming torches, seeking rats and mongooses that they encircle and beat to death.

Each itinerary is followed by a vignette with one main character: a Muslim factory owner who feels guilty because the women who sew shirts in his sweatshop are going blind; a delivery “boy” (he is almost 30) who barely exists for the rich women whose furniture he delivers; a middle-aged communist whose ideology fails him when he unexpectedly falls in love. Some of them have come to Kittur from inland villages, desperately hoping to improve their circumstance and under enormous pressure to send most of their pitiful earnings to the family back home.

Adiga’s India is a country where the poor gravitate to coastal cities, leaving behind what the protagonist of The White Tiger — a village boy who got rich by murdering his master — designated “the dark”. A cart-puller, Chenayya, vividly recalls the day he arrived in Kittur and was shown around by a female cousin whom he never saw again. He also remembers what came next: “the terrible contraction, the life that got smaller and smaller by the day in the city”.

Even more cruelly, some of Adiga’s characters believe for a time that they’ve struck lucky. A mosquito-man, George D’Souza, escapes his job spraying stagnant water with chemicals when he finds a benefactor, a wealthy woman who takes him on as a gardener and agrees to employ his sister as a cook. George barely thinks about the woman whose job his sister has taken or what the old cook will do now that she is unemployed; as Adiga shows again and again, the poor cannot afford class loyalties. But in this novel the benevolence of the rich is arbitrarily bestowed and withdrawn and most of Adiga’s characters come up against a divide they are never able to cross.

There is something Dickensian about Adiga’s outrage on behalf of people who have nothing. He is Dickensian, too, in the way in which he creates dozens of characters, bringing them to life with a few telling details. If there is something not quite satisfying about Between the Assassinations, it isn’t just the overlap with The White Tiger; it’s that the individual stories and characters barely connect.

Both his books to date use ingenious framing devices, but the question left unanswered by this new novel is what this hugely talented writer could do without them.

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga Atlantic Books, £14.99; Buy this book; 320pp

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