Nothing, though, in Dickens' entire repertoire could match - in sheer poignancy, raw emotion and repeated heartbreak - a day in the life of India. Deepti Kapoor prefaces her novel with a quote from the Mahabharata warning that lack of knowledge and therefore wisdom mean that "covetousness and avarice will overwhelm them all". Happily, her own judgments are more nuanced and more benign than that. India is easy to love, but the emotion should be tough love, informed by awareness of how unjust and unfair the system can be, suffused by human sympathy and, wherever possible, kindness.

Many recent novels (especially Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger) provide penetrating insights into Indian society, as do - in their own schmaltzy, Dickensian way - films like Lion and Slumdog Millionaire. None quite matches the incisive, biting account of the corruptions of wealth and power in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games.

Now Kapoor's Age of Vice jostles its way into a crowded field. The story opens with an incident sadly plausible. An expensive car jumps the curb and kills homeless, itinerant workers sleeping rough on the footpath. A driver of someone richer and more powerful duly takes the blame. Using differing voices and divergent recollections, Kapoor keeps circling back to that tragedy.

From this incident, in Delhi in 2004, the reader is drawn back to Uttar Pradesh 13 years earlier. Our hero, Ajay, is then eight years old, barely literate but "watchful inside the sockets of his eyes". Within a few pages, murders are committed and the young child is sold into indentured labour. He is rescued by a dissolute, rich young man. In the original King Kong, Fay Wray is promised "glamour, adventure, romance - and the thrill of a lifetime". Ajay, by contrast, is merely offered a bit of steady money, three pairs of socks, a nail-clipper and a roof over his head.

Kapoor's tale then takes too long to describe the spoiled, cossetted routine of rich Delhi entrepreneurs. As a recent movie, Triangle of Sadness, rich folk can be inclined to behave badly, to take others for granted, and abuse their bodies, their friends and their servants. Here, the brunt of frequent bad moods is borne by the peons, to use the Indian coinage, who are nonetheless meant to be instantly but invisibly available.

None of that is new, surprising or shocking to anyone who has spent time in India. In The White Tiger, a former peon with a hard luck story takes theatrical revenge on his oppressor. In Sacred Games, beleaguered servants of what passes for justice finally corner a mob boss. In Age of Vice, Ajay proves proficient not just in the arts of toadying but as a no-holds-barred fighter. Kapoor deftly inserts scenes, economically written, of extreme violence.

The novel gains pace and depth when the focus shifts from a master-servant relationship. A girlfriend journalist is given a long spell in the spotlight before she morphs into a student of social anthropology at LSE. A sequence where a manipulative ne'er-do-well battles amnesia during a monstrous hangover is particularly smart.

So too is a trip into the countryside, not as a rural idyll but as a depressingly realistic setting for dust, smoke, faeces, burning plastic, dripping engine oil, garbage and rotting fruit.

Novelists view India through a kaleidoscope rather than a telescope, even when they are writing magical stories like Midnight's Children or The God of Small Things. That kaleidoscope technique works well for Kapoor, as she shifts between scenes in a prison (far more chilling than anything in Dickens), a kidnapping and a protest by farmers against further expropriation of their land holdings.

As the plot develops, so too does Kapoor's austere dissection of her characters' motives and intentions. One perceives the world through "plagued eyes". Another's propensity for self-abuse has him compared to "a needle gouging the skin to find a vein". Kapoor clinically assesses the collusion involved in covering up the facts of a crime.

Age of Vice concludes with an Indian wedding, a mass of colour, emotion, movement and theatre in itself. Into the wedding day Kapoor inserts a huge diamond from Sierra Leone, a murder contract, a disenchanted Israeli security chief, a coke-raddled groom and a dispute over control of the Punjab liquor trade. Then she ratchets up the tension and drama, as well as the homicides. Quite unlike the majority of novels, Kapoor's ending is the best segment in the entire book.