Arundhati Roy, “The God of Small Things”

This is a simply extraordinary book. I have seldom had such an intensely pleasurable reading experience. I’d agree with reviewers who say that to summarise or comment on the plot is simply to do violence to the work.

Alright, the simple obvious stuff for those who don’t know. This is the story of a family, from the outset evidently afflicted by tragedy. The book slowly spirals between present and past, echoes of the ramifications and later meaning of events colouring things as they unfold. It is told in the way memory or oral history works, past and present are not really separate, they interweave and hold common meanings in a dance around the meaning already assigned events by the storyteller – circling about an important, pivotal truth.

Thematically, the book is brilliantly wide-ranging, yet entirely understated. In the relatively compressed cast of an upper-middle class family of Anglophile Indians and a few members of their township, there is quite enough material to explore ideas of the divisions within people and their cultures. India’s tense, in some ways perhaps self-annihilating, relationship with English culture and the colonial legacy. The subversion of tradition by tourism. The idea of History. Class and caste and race, with their attendant economic and cultural conflict. The significance in a poly-lingual society of when one uses what language to whom for what purpose. How as adults, we are shaped by who we were as children.

The engine of the book, however, is the idea of “the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how” and how much. Transgressions cause catastrophes. Most significantly, the malevolent spite that causes so much of the suffering in the book, stems from a woman who never managed to forgive and release an unrequited love – and by clinging to it, made it a source of evil in her life and the lives of others.

It’s greatest triumph, for me, however, is its prose. Every single page sings with an extraordinary effusion of detail. Roy’s ability, in particular, to capture the language and perspective of children is extraordinary: the friendly local Bar Nowl, the horrifying Afternoon Gnap, the terrors of punishment delayed until Lay Ter. Every smallest detail is described with such love for the characters and the world they move in:

“Pressed against the coldness of a cheek, wet with shattered rain.”

As someone said of Chandler: “a kind of lightning strikes on every page.” Her tropes and repeated phrases are not an affectation, they are a private language drawing the reader in.

I know people who have cried over the ending, it doesn’t surprise me in the least. Such a mixture of pain and beauty is compelling.