There has been a slow buzz rising in the global literary community over the past week. Publishers have announced that they will be releasing the second novel from Indian author and prominent activist Arundhati Roy.
This is big news because Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things, was a bestseller that went on to win the Booker Prize, and Roy, despite her output of non-fiction work, has not released any fiction writing in almost 20 years. The news is particularly welcome because The God of Small Things has managed to carve out a niche for itself in the hearts of readers all across the world. Is there anyone who actually dislikes this novel? If so, I am yet to meet that person.
Roy presents us with a shifting, alternating and crafty use of time in her novel. The chapters alternate between the past and present and so, we are presented with the main characters, fraternal twins, Estha and Rahel, when they are seven-years-old in the sixties and then in the early nineties when they are both thirty-one-years old.
The alternating time frames work for the purposes of The God of Small Things because it allows the reader to view and assess how two people are changed and affected by time, how adulthood is often marred by the scars gained in childhood, how death comes for us all in the end, how relationships that were once incredibly close can become frayed and destroyed with the efforts of time.
These are all ideas that are central to the novel and the framing effect use by Roy helps to emphasize all of these ideas because of the way in which she structures her novel.
Estha and Rahel, as children, live with their beautiful mother Amma, their elderly grandmother Mammachi, their malicious aunt Baby Kochamma, and their uncle Chacko.
The children are also quite fond of Velutha, a skilled and kindly dalit, an untouchable, who works for their family and, unbeknownst to everyone, is involved in an illicit love affair with Amma.
These are all the main players in the story and one by one, Roy makes the reader understand and empathize with the characters, even those who are not particularly likeable, such as Baby Kochamma, and are given reasons from their past which explain the development of their individual personalities. The way the past – past deeds, past actions – influence the present day lives of the characters is something that Roy is particularly skilled at presenting.
Roy’s writing is a whirlwind of poetry. She picks the reader up and tosses them in a storm made entirely out of the words she writes. When we witness Velutha and Amma’s sweet, forbidden trysts by the river, the author hurls us into a whirlwind of a romance. When a child dies and all the other characters must face up to the consequences of their actions, Roy throws us into the middle of all the pain that forms the crux of the novel. When Baby Kochamma forces the children to commit the deed that destroys several lives, Arundhati Roy uses her writing to lure the unsuspecting reader into a space where only the most bare and most raw emotions are forced on to us so that we can see the horror and tragedy that emerges out of the culmination of corruption, politics, patriarchy, colonialist influences, abuse, and the caste system – all dangers which the author uses the novel to highlight.
To say more about the novel would be to spoil it. All that can be said is that in a few years from now, if not already, The God of Small Things will be a classic; it will be one of those books that everyone would be expected to have read. It contains a great story which, to borrow a quote from the novel, means that even when “you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, [and] who doesn’t” you will still want to know again because “the Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again.” The God of Small Things is a tale you will want to hear again and again and again.