Having read Q&A after seeing Slumdog Millionaire, I'm convinced that one could cobble together one great story out of the two of them.

I liked the movie a lot when I saw it, but it's one of those where, the more I think about it, the more I'm unsure why exactly I liked it. Yes, Danny Boyle is a great director, the movie looks amazing and it's almost impossible to not be swept up in it, but I can definitely see why people are accusing him of "slum tourism"; the way he romanticizes the story, making everything fit nicely into a timeline of impossible coincidences and ending on that ridiculously sentimental ending where the poor boy wins it all and all the bad guys get what they deserve almost makes me wonder if he's being serious or if the point is to overdo it completely to point out just how impossible it really is for a poor Indian orphan to become a success in New India.

Q&A, on the other hand, gets a lot of things right. I had heard that the plot was different, but I was surprised at how different. The entire backstory is changed, the individual episodes that lead up to him knowing the answers are often very different, changing the tone of the story quite a lot - not to mention that the protagonist is completely different. Not only his name, but the way he acts, the way he actually does things rather than sit back and wait for things to happen to him. I like that. And while Swarup isn't as great a writer as Boyle is a director, he gets the job done for the most part, even though the movie ends up a lot more coherent - yes, the book has a more believable story, but the movie's story is has a better narrative. Not unlike Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist I never quite buy the illusion that the book is mostly one long monologue - especially since he makes a point of his narrator being so very uneducated - and it's mostly fairly superficial stuff, but hey, it zips nicely along and it goes into places the movie didn't. Where the movie is a story of one Indian boy's path to riches, the book does a better job of being about India itself - as suggested by our plucky hero having three names: one Muslim, one Christian, and one Hindu.

But then Swarup blows it all on the ending. I'm going to avoid spoilers, but it's definitely the biggest difference between the two versions; while both endings seem like almost impossible coincidences, at least Boyle's ending is the sort of ending you want to believe in even if you know it's probably impossible. Swarup's is just... poor. A couple of huge clichés on top of what was looking like a solid, if not great, novel that drags it down and makes me wish I'd skipped the last 15 pages.