The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee review: 'particularly good at chases'
He may have made his name writing historical crime novels, but in The Pinnacle Abir Mukherjee shows he also excels at fast-paced contemporary thrillers, writes David Robinson
If you’re making a whisky advert in India and you can’t get the Rock and Matt Damon, you go for someone like George Abercrombie. Actually, he is even better: not only has he been Hollywood-famous for three decades but he is married to Bollywood icon Sweety Sahota. Ever since a vindictive US President set the IRS on George, the golden couple have been living on the 68th floor of Mumbai’s most luxurious skyscraper, The Pinnacle.
That is where Mukherjee’s latest standalone novel effectively begins, when a hungover George finds the body of his murdered wife in her bedroom. Sweety is so popular that her murder attracts the attention of the presidents of both India and the US (whose ramblings sound impeccably Trump-like) and George - the prime suspect - realises that 1.4 billion Indians want to tear him limb from limb. Compared to all this, the plotlines of Mukherjee’s much-loved Wyndham & Banerjee novels, set in 1920s India, read like Anita Brookner.
The success of Hunted, his first standalone, which was written on a similarly epic scale and which last year won two of the top awards for British crime writing, shows that Mukherjee is equally adept in two different registers - historical crime and contemporary thrillers with an international twist. Being good at writing character helps. George, for example, constantly lives up to the assessment of Gemma, Sweety’s PA, that “all the charm, on-screen presence and money in the world couldn’t buy self-awareness”.
Although his marriage to Sweety was tempestuous enough, and although Gemma is being blackmailed over an affair with a politician, for me the emotional fulcrum of the book is George’s servant, Amit. Along with George, he is the police’s - though not the reader’s - chief suspect in Sweety’s murder, and he certainly didn’t do himself any favours by stealing a small amount of money and a pair of her earrings before disappearing.
A lovable rogue, Amit ducks and dives, living on his wits, constantly lying and playing everyone off against each other, for the sake of a few Gandhis (rupees) more. When the police ask him to tell the truth and confess, he knows that what they really want is “his agreement, his acquiescence, in what they wished to be true.” He knows that gangs run security even in places like The Pinnacle which claim to be uncontaminated by the city’s crime and corruption, and that politicians run the gangs.
Following Amit, we move from the suffocating luxury of the Pinnacle (“more marble than a warehouse of Wagyu steak”, infinity pool slung between it and another tower on the 50th floor, and “the fastest lifts in India, sir”) to the mean streets of Mumbai, where “every hour required compromise, or supplications, or abasement, simply to get by”. Because of him, along with Gemma and George - who take it in turn to tell the story - we will see the city the tourists sees (the Gateway to India, the luxury high-rises, Ice Town) and city it doesn’t (the clammy heat of the Sainted Mother Laundry, the early-morning quiet before the street vendors set up their wares, “when the city was at its best, or its least objectionable”).
Along the way - usually at speed (as Hunted showed, Mukherjee is particularly good at chases) we will traverse chasms of social inequality, pass jumping-on places for trains that are just as busy as stations, and repeatedly race a blackmailer against time. We will learn about what in India is called Eve-teasing and what we in the West call sexually harassing women. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Bollywood.
In The Burning Grounds, Mukherjee’s latest Wyndham & Banerjee novel, we saw the beginnings of India’s film industry. With Sweety Sahota, and her fellow stars such as Bollywood bad boy Chunky Malhotra, we see how complete its hold on Indian culture has become. Yet its attraction never wanes. When Amit wants a fellow servant to help him, but is too broke to bribe her, there is one surefire inducement he can offer. One day, he says, their story will make them both famous and “You could end up in films.”
The Pinnacle, by Abir Mukherjee, Harvill Secker, £16.99
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