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Amnesty by Aravind Adiga review – a migrant’s tale

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/20/amnesty-by-aravind-adiga-review

A Sri Lankan migrant in Sydney agonises over whether to tell the police about a murder and risk deportation

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.

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