The God of Small Things.

Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, appeared twenty years after she won the Booker Prize for her debut, 1997’s The God of Small Things, and the critical response to the latter book was somewhat tepid because of the delay between releases and the way critics seemed to feel the second novel fell short of the promise of the first. Having read both this year, in reverse order, however, I feel the opposite way: her second book, while imperfect, felt much more like the work of a mature, accomplished writer, better able to manage her plot and her characters, while also crafting more accessible prose and better integrating real history into the story.

The God of Small Things unfurls in nonlinear fashion, giving the reader the story of “two-egg twins” Rahel and Estha, born to a mother, Ammu Ipe, who married quickly to get away from her parents only to find her husband was a feckless and abusive alcoholic. They return to Ammu’s native village, living with her parents and her brother, Chacko, whose ex-wife Margaret and daughter Sophie Mol have stayed in England with Margaret’s new husband Joe. When Joe dies in a car crash, Margaret and Sophie Mol visit Chacko for the holidays, but a series of misunderstandings, inadvertent and deliberate, lead the three children to try to run away on a makeshift boat, only to have it capsize and to have Sophie Mol drown, a death that is blamed on a local untouchable (dalit), Velutha, a gifted carpenter who is beloved by the twins and has a brief affair with Ammu that contributes to the plot against him.

One common theme among Roy’s two novels and within her political writing and advocacy is an overt criticism of India’s class system and discrimination that persist today even in the face of a constitutional clause banning caste discrimination. Velutha is talented, intelligent, and kind, but cannot escape the birthright that comes of being born an untouchable. The twins, of course oblivious to such societal mores, come to admire and love him, and eventually Ammu, despite her caste status, does as well, which infuriates her spinster aunt “Baby” Kochamma, who herself lost out on the great love of her life, a Catholic priest who would not leave his orders for her (and whom she chased by briefly entering a convent), and now takes out her bitterness on everyone around her. Velutha eventually becomes involved with the local communist party as well, a step that contributes to the prejudice against him and to Baby’s identification of him as an enemy to be targeted, allowing him to stand in as a synecdochic figure for both his caste and for the party most associated with trying to crush the historical structure of social inequality.

Estha is molested by a stranger in a graphic (and gross) scene towards the beginning of the novel that never received any resolution or connection to the rest of the story. The perpetrator never re-appears, let alone faces any sort of justice, while any effects Estha suffers from the trauma are subtle and never seemed to relate to the tempest of tragedies at the book’s heart – the death of Sophie Mol and the doomed affair between Ammu and Velutha. That such things happen, and are generally not dealt with by anyone or even revealed by the victims, is easy to understand and accept, but the presence of such a scene and the details the reader receives are incongruous in the greater narrative and are simply dropped beyond occasional mention of Estha’s fear that the pedophile will return to abuse him again or seek vengeance on his family.

I thought The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was hard to follow because of my ignorance of the aspects of Indian history that Roy incorporated into her novel, but it was a cakewalk compared to The God of Small Things, which makes even broader assumptions of the reader’s familiarity with real-life events of India’s post-colonial period and political tensions that came with the rise of communism and the extremist Naxalite movement in the late 1960s. Roy’s prose has also become clearer over the last twenty years; The God of Small Things features stunted prose, with far too many sentence fragments that read more like unfinished thoughts, a literary device I’ve always found jarring as someone who thinks and writes in full sentences just about all of the time. (The occasional fragment can work well in context, but too many of them together give me the impression of listening to a vinyl record with a large scratch on it, causing the needle to skip on every rotation.) That this won the Booker Prize doesn’t surprise me; it’s an intelligent, important novel of ideas with huge themes that tackles controversial subjects. Its difficulty level did surprise me, however, given that her later work, while still somewhat opaque, was much easier to access.

Next up: Steve Brusatte’s brand-new The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World.