24. Slumdog Millionaire

by Vikas Swarup

Originally published under the title Q&A, I read this book after watching the movie adaptation which made a sizable splash not too long ago. A lot of people come down on movie adaptations of novels. To a certain extent that's justified. A movie cannot present as much content over 2 hours as a novel can, even a relatively short one. So, just walking in the theater you know that the movie has to be different from the novel. There will often be omissions in the story or places where the movie glosses over things that the author spent considerable time on in the book. Occasionally, the movie will even change content. *gasp*

None of this means that the movie has to be bad or even a poor representation of the source material and I'm tired of people who go on rants about movie adaptations of novels. In some cases the movie is better than the source novel. (see: "The Thirteenth Warrior" vs. Crichton's Eaters of the Dead) Many times I find that the movie, while a different entity from the novel, is a good movie and honestly, as a lit teacher, if a movie adapation gets someone to read a book then hallelujah.

"Slumdog Millionaire" is a good revisioning of the novel and if you've watched the film, you've got a pretty good idea of the book. That's not to say the book isn't worth reading though. Swarup's novel is beautifully written. Ram Mohammad Thomas is a bright but uneducated man living in slums of India. When he manages to answer all the questions in a quiz show, the assumption is that Mr. Thomas must be a big fat cheater. To that end, Mr. Thomas explains question by question how events, some bizarre, in his life gave him the answers to these questions. The rest was just dumb luck. The structure is interesting. Each question is a chapter and the chapter starts out with a vignette from his life and ends with the question being asked in the quiz show. The questions jump around in Mr. Thomas's personal timeline, and even thought this could become quite confusing, Swarup masterfully gives the reader enough to quickly put it in context.

The biggest difference between the movie and the novel is a fully developed secondary plot thread that the movie just skipped all together. The movie dropped a lot of the dark elements in the novel and inserted a different set of dark elements. After reading the book and seeing the movie, it falls in the "different but equally good" category and I encourage anyone who watched the movie to seek out the novel.