Book 790: The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

OMG ya’ll, clearly, I should be judging the next Booker Prize. First Wolf Hall and now this, I get why they choose these beautiful books as winners. I’m only partially serious. I still think so many of the books are boring old stuffy books that are specifically chosen because of the inability of large swaths of the population to comprehend or appreciate them. So, boo on that.

All kidding aside, this was an incredibly beautifully written DEBUT novel. I was floored when I found that out. The way she wrote and the way time flowed eerily (and seamlessly) backward and forward in this novel it truly felt like a master class in novels. No wonder she won the prize—I’m definitely going to have to read her only other fictional work, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, at some point because everything else she’s written is nonfiction (what?!).

Aside from the beautiful language, I’m not sure what else there is to love about this novel. It’s not a happy novel and you know that within the first few pages. A child dies, two families are torn apart, someone else is dead, twins are separated. I mean if I’m honest all I can think to compare it to is Steinbeck’s über depressing Grapes of Wrath and that’s only a surface deep comparison.

It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection.

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.

To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do. (181)

This novel is about death and processing it, everything else in the novel just exacerbates or enhances it. From the politics and class to the religion and family dynamics, the reader is never quite sure what is going to come next. A lot of this is from the fluidity of time throughout the novel which ebbs and flows erratically jumping from the two-week time frame of the core story about death to current day to the distant past.

Roy’s observations of the influence of religion, class, and politics were somehow stark with clarity from hindsight but also muddied with childhood innocence and fantasy. It was surreal to read the two especially with time jumping around (sometimes within the same paragraph):

Structurally—this somewhat rudimentary argument went—Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end. Whereas the Hindu mind had to make more complex adjustments. (64)

To be fair to Comrade Pillai, he did not plan the course of events that followed. He merely slipped his ready fingers into History’s waiting glove.
It was not entirely his fault that he lived in a society where a man’s death could be more profitable than his life had ever been. (267)

What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn’t know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.
There was nothing accidental about what happened that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no stray mugging or personal settling of scores. This was an era imprinting itself on those who lived in it.
History in live performance. (293)

But, by far aside from one of the final scenes (not necessarily for shock value, but it caught me completely off guard), Roy’s ability to write beautifully descriptive passages was the best part of the novel. I mean this passage, jumps around incredibly, but has so much to take in with so many references and it just works.

In Pappachi’s study, mounted butterflies and moths had disintegrated into small heaps of iridescent dust that powdered the bottom of their glass display cases, leaving the pins that had impaled them naked. Cruel. The room was rank with fungus and disuse. An old neon-green hula hoop hung from a wooden peg on the wall, a huge saint’s discarded halo. A column of shining black ants walked across a windowsill, their bottoms tilted upwards, like a line of mincing chorus girls in a Busby Berkeley musical. Silhouetted against the sun. Buffed and beautiful. (148)

You can pick ANY sentence in that paragraph and it sets a scene. And yet when you combine them all together it gives you a very specific, very brief snapshot of a moment in time that is so visceral you can smell the fungus and hear the faint humming of a saint that’s just left the room.

I barely touch on the plot, but I’m not sure that matters really. The book itself leaves you with an overwhelming sense of sadness and inevitability. It’s built through the plot, but knowing how it’s going to end within the first 10-15 pages makes a lot of what follows irrelevant and mostly details to get you to the utter despair in which the families wallow. Seriously, Roy could give some Southern Gothic writers runs for their money!

Recommendation: 100% worth the read. It definitely won’t be for everyone, but if you can appreciate stunning passages that transport you physically or emotionally to somewhere you’ve never been then you’ll find something beautiful in this. The story is definitely oppressive and the experiences of the protagonist are not for the weak of stomach, but Roy’s observations on class, race, politics, feminism, and any other number of things come across without beating you over the head with them.

Opening Line: “May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.”

Closing Line: “She had a dry rose in her hair. She turned to say it once again: ‘Naaley.‘ Tomorrow.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes from The God of Small Things
“Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is there wasn’t an ‘exactly when.’ It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of  conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha’s silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn’t an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through a dry season, except that in Estha’s case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.” (12)

“What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. It was this that grew inside her, and eventually led her to love by night the man her children loved by day. To use by night the boat that her children used by day. The boat that Estha sat on, and Rahel found.” (44)