Reviewing an Indian novel is like going to India on holiday: at some point, no matter how inventive your imagination or contrarian your spirit, you will eventually have to mention that it is a place of contrasts, extremes, sensuality and chaotic energy. So let’s get this out of the way as soon as possible: The Story of My Assassins is a book about the deeply ugly and violent underbelly of Indian society, written in exquisitely beautiful language which pulses with chaotic energy from the word go. Oh, and there’s plenty of sex too.

Tarun J Tejpal’s second book is a crime novel without a proper crime at its heart; a thriller which sets out its plot from the outset. As might be expected for an ostensible piece of genre fiction, it ticks certain boxes: the central character is a self-loathing anti-hero, a middle-aged investigative journalist more interested in getting his rocks off with a succession of beautiful and conflicted women than saving the world. At one point he shuts up a lippy woman who complains about his endless womanising by having sex with her: that the author is a middle-aged editor of Tehelka, a hard-hitting Indian investigative magazine, hardly needs mentioning.

Therefore, when an attempt on his life is made, no-one is more surprised than him. Yet that is where The Story of My Assassins takes a startling, or perhaps entirely logical, departure: the novel is the story of those would-be assassins. The conventions of detective fiction are put to one side as Tejpal treats us to a Dickensian panorama of the chaotic brutality of life in the villages and slums, where tribal feudalism rules, what passes as order is maintained by the nakedly capricious acts of police department sadists and personal liberty is preserved with the twist of a knife and a healthy dose of luck. Mutilations, genital torture, gang rape, loved ones slaughtered and innocent lives ruined in the blink of an eye – it’s all pretty grim reading, often sickeningly so.

Yet while Western eyes can tire quite quickly of gritty exposes of the dark side of the Indian economic miracle – one nice young man from one of those nice NGOs knocked on my door recently raising money for Indian babies who have been brutalised by ‘the fucked-up medieval caste system they have over there’ – Tejpal does something much cleverer and subtler than merely present us with the pornography of human misery. His big theme is how fate and chance govern Indian lives: from a decadent and paranoid elite getting fat off the cream of the commonwealth through to the clerks and public servants doing their best to eke out a life in the unceasing bureaucracy of creaking state machinery, all the way down to the cynical street gangs and superstitious villagers.

If the motto of The Wire was ‘everything is connected’, demonstrating how the War on Drugs corrupted every aspect of civil society, here it is impossible to conclude that anything is connected to anything else – just violence and retribution, echoing down and repeating itself endless through the ages, barely held together by crumbling imperial institutions and propped up by the untrustworthy volatility of market capitalism. Famously, The Wire included a scene of a gangster explaining to a cop why he allowed a known hustler to play poker, even though it involved him regularly ripping them off: ‘Because this is America, man.’ Here, a policeman tries to explain the convoluted scheme behind the attempted assassination:

This is India, my friend. Why do anything simply if you can do it in a complicated way? Have you ever been to get a driving licence or a ration card? Have you ever filed a complaint at a police station? Have you ever got a child admitted to school? It’s the brahminical brain, so wily, so twisted, it draws a straight line by making circles.

The line also recalls the line, ‘Elvira, you is a bitch’, from VS Naipul’s masterful satire on colonial-style democracy The Suffrage of Elvira – Naipul is an obvious influence and admirer. Like his literary mentor, Tejpal has a deep scepticism of the influence of Western thought and literature on improving the natives, expressed both at his recent UK appearance at the Battle of Ideas festival and present here. In the tale of Kabir M, a Muslim brought up by his paranoid father in a Christian school to make himself invisible in a Hindu country, Tejpal tells us:

The arithmetic and algebra he could manage, and Hindi he was good at. But English, and every other subject – all of them taught in English – fried his brains. He was not alone in this. The entire school was full of boys whose brains were being detonated by Shakespeare and Dickens and Wordsworth and Tennyson and memoriam and daffodils and tiger tiger burning bright and solitary reapers and artful dodgers and thous and forsooths and the rhymes of ancient mariners…English was to be ambushed ruthlessly when and where the opportunity arose. Its soldiers were to be mangled, shot, amputated wherever they were spotted…Their weapon of Hindi was a mere slingshot compared to the enemy’s cannon…Some of them were so completely ruined by English, so shrunk by its brutal onslaught, that they never managed to regain their full size…Of course there were some boys – especially from the army cantonment – who spoke English as if they were pissing in the bushes behind the school wall. A flowing, gushing, casual stream, laughingly delivered…

An anxious parent looking for a decent, well-rounded education in the UK may reflect that having their child’s brain fried by the English ‘cannon’ may be a considerable achievement. Kabir himself only returns to this doggerel as he has his circumcised penis mangled in a police cell: an unfortunate casualty of a friend’s indiscretion. As another character observes later on, his atheist father raised him to be innocuous to all religions, only to be fucked by all sides. Tejpal would have us believe he is a Caliban, happy to be taught the language of his masters only if he can curse them with it – but he may have pause for thought that hatred of ‘the enemy’s cannon’ is stronger in the West than anywhere else, exploded by vulgar post-colonialism, Western self-loathing and impact agendas.

It is this that comes across as the strength of The Story of My Assassins. It does, in the end, become a suspense thriller, although one which has little to do with its brahminical plot but more whether Indian society is in the process of modernisation or just merely in a modern form of chaos. Just as the brilliance of his bête noir Dickens lay in recognising and reflecting the revolution in social relations which took place alongside the material development offered by the Industrial Revolution, Tejpal too must recognise that for all his claims of India progressing in circles than straight lines, that something else more powerful is afoot. It should come as no surprise that a member of India’s emerging elite, even an unhappy one, would feel tempted to point his fellow countrymen – emerging from generations of poverty and misery, and hungry to share in some of the new growth – towards the West and warn them the grass is greener on the other side. If the elite are as shoddy and disorganised as he paints them here, then India may have a rough road ahead in its continuing development.

Just like poor Kabir, language is the undoing of Tejpal: you simply cannot believe that a writer who uses English so inventively and richly despises the canon as much as he claims. Perhaps, like one of his many characters, he is enjoying denouncing it with the one hand while using the other to nab a share for himself. Either way, The Story of My Assassins is a thrilling and vivid novel, and one which easily stands out amongst an increasingly drab literary landscape. Again, that such a novel currently languishes without a UK publisher tells Tejpal more about the West’s problems than he realises.