Cursory enquiries among those with access to the manuscript, amid all the foolish pre-publication fan-dangle, as to what Arundhati Roy's novel was about produced some baffling answers. "It's a thriller." "It's about caste and class politics in Kerala." "It's about a corrupted childhood." Mostly wrong, I feel, although I can see the difficulty of summing it up in a few words.
The God of Small Things is mainly about damaged love. It's about the exploding intensity of love in the most elementary of relationships—between mother and son, man and woman, brother and sister. Ways of loving, you might say, in which the seeds of madness, delusion, withdrawal, destitution and savage death were sown from the start. Or as Rahel, the novel's narrator, points out more than once in her excessive habit of capitalising certain words for emphasis: "It could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago...that it really began when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved. And how much." Roy marks out the well-explored territory of love and death as her own, and then introduces themes that have been mined deeply in novels elsewhere. The magical bonding between twins, for instance. A rich comic view of precocious childhood impinging on an adult world. Torpor and tragedy in the deep south. The force of nature as personified by the watchful river, a presence that is benign, liberating and destructive. However, this is not to suggest that Roy's work is in any way derivative or her talent anything less than original. But if books, like people, have genealogies, then hers (it could be pure chance) harks back to famous novels by writers from the American Deep South: a child's world disordered by adult truths in the muscular narratives of William Faulkner and Harper Lee, violence invading the steamy small towns in Carson McCullers' tales or the half-expected incest erupting between the fatally attractive twins in Donna Tartt's The Secret History.
So is The God of Small Things one of those ponderous gloom-and-doom novels that you may buy but never get through? On the contrary, it is so well-paced, evocative and densely-plotted that it sustains the tension and tautness of a thriller. (Barring one or two occasions I might add but, mercifully, it is a short though by no means a simple book.) The action centres on two interwoven narratives: Rahel returns to Ayemenem, her ancestral riverside home in Kerala, to look for her twin brother Estha. Twenty-three years ago, aged eight, the twins were separated. Ammu, their mother, had brought them to live at Ayemenem after her unhappy marriage and divorce from a tea planter in Assam. Then an accident occurred. Their idyllic childhood on the plantation house with a pickle factory was shattered with the death by drowning of their half-English cousin Sophie, visiting from London for her Christmas holidays.
Although the weaving of the past and the present—Rahel's reunion with Estha and the memory of the event that led to the twins parting—are the main strands, they are only two in a tightly packed skein of many threads. Part of the book's virtuosity lies in its dexterous unravelling of multiple threads as in a superbly-edited film. (Note scrawled in a margin of my copy of the book: "Cross-cutting, like a film." Which is interesting, for Roy seems to have put all her genius, probably her life, into a novel and not in her screenplays.) Not one but three terrible deaths, including the beating to pulp of a low-caste factory hand by the police, darken the bright, memorably funny, glittering-sharp events and family portraits of a lost childhood. (The children's visit to see The Sound of Music is a classic).
But unlike those who aspire to write comedy and fail because they think it is merely a matter of situation and timing, Roy knows that an important facet of comic writing is pathos, just as at the heart of any lingering tragedy there often lurks a sense of the ridiculous. In The God of Small Things it is not the events themselves but carefully shaded nuances that foreshadow the outcome, even in the knowing assumptions of childhood's beliefs.
According to Estha, if they'd been born on a bus, they'd have got free bus rides for the rest of their lives. It wasn't clear where he'd got this information from, or how he knew these things, but for years the twins harboured a faint resentment against their par -ents for having diddled them out of a lifetime of free bus rides.... They also believed that if they were killed on a zebra crossing, the Government would pay for their funerals. They had the definite impression that was what zebra crossings were meant for. Free funerals.
Like the precocious twins in her novel—children who can read complicated sentences backwards and possess a Satanic gleam in their eye—Roy has a tendency to be carried away by her gifts. I can foresee readers, critics and any number of profoundly literate Malayali scholars lavishing praise on the limpid beauty of her prose, her sudden similes, startling metaphors and flights into childish or regional aphorism. Many of the descriptive passages of the Ayemenen house, the river and the turning of the southern seasons are lovely. But I must confess that the repeated wordplay began to fizzle out for me after a while, as some of the metaphors flew out of control ("history's twisted chickens would come home to roost") and the continuous use of capital letters began to set my teeth on edge:
With that cold feeling on a hot afternoon that Life had been Lived. That her cup was full of dust.... Ammu gathered up her heavy hair, wrapped it round her face, and peered down the road to Age and Death through its parted strands.
There were other bits that strained my credulity. I cannot believe that an inspector at any police station in small-town Kerala would tap the breasts of a woman from a well-known local family with his baton ("as though he was choosing mangoes from a basket"), whatever her crime, and more so in the presence of her two children. I also found the passages on the stoned Kathakali dancers and the build-up of the police search ending in the factory-hand's brutal murder too long: like overcooked dishes they jaded the palate and slowed the pace of an otherwise deliciously-savoured meal.
But these are small faults in a work of unusual range and depth and feeling, all the more remarkable for finding expression in a first novel. Still, for all the pleasure that you and I may derive from it, there is another crucial test that the novel must pass. Roy's book is firmly set in a particular place (district Kottayam, south Kerala) and its main line of action is concentrated in a particular time (a few days, a few hours in December '69). Its chief cast is drawn from the small community of Syrian Christians.
It seems to me to be infinitely less important to discover how much the novelist has excavated from her own life than to find out what Malayalis in general, and Syrian Christians in particular, think of it. All I have spoken to are in raptures, just as people who knew Bombay at a particular period wept on the first reading of Midnight's Chil -dren. It was their city, they said, it was the story of their lives. But of course it could have been anybody's city, anyone's life.
Strictly observing the unities of time and place, Roy lifts her story from the confines of one family's peculiarity in one particular community to encompass caste, Christianity and class struggle in Kerala. Then, with the classic novelist's ability to condense action and intensify feeling, she raises her tale to an approximation of universal truths. Because childhood, love and death are the stuff of life in everyone's world.
My own space is cramped and where I live I wage a daily battle for shelf space for piles and piles of books that I ought to but cannot bear to give away. But for The God of Small Things there will be always be room on a shelf close at hand. I cannot think of a more heartfelt compliment from a reader.
