I have a confession to make: this is not going to be a review so much as a list of reasons why The God of Small Things is amazing. Although I recently read it for the second time, I still found it so moving that sometimes I could hardly bear to read it, knowing as I did what would happen to the characters. Here are some of the reasons why I loved it so much:
It transports you to another time and place – right from the first paragraph (‘The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air’) you are sucked into 1960s Kerala. Sometimes I would emerge with the feeling of one who has just woken up in a strange bed, forced to remind myself that I wasn’t actually in India.
The use of language is beautiful – the novel is bursting with unusual metaphors and clever puns; Roy’s idiosyncratic writing style is almost a character in its own right. She wallows in the richness of the English language with a marvellous sense of assurance: for instance, Baby Kochamma’s ‘neckmole licked its chops and thrummed with delicious anticipation’, and the spectre of Pappachi’s ‘cold moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts landed lightly on Rahel’s heart’.
The depiction of childhood is spot-on – I don’t think enough books capture the weirdness of childhood, the bizarre things children think and do. Estha and Rahel, who read words backwards for the fun of it, worry that their mother will love their English cousin more than them, and visit a social outcast’s house while pretending to be middle-aged women in saris, seem wonderfully real.
Roy shows compassion towards all her characters – though many of them do awful things, she take great pains to demonstrate why they act the way they do. She also expertly unsettles the reader’s feelings of liberal superiority: it is very easy to condemn the barbarism of the caste system, but most people will feel a twinge of discomfort when they read about Estha and Rahel’s incestuous relationship. Our uneasiness about this violation of ‘the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how’ helps us to understand the mindset of people born into a caste system, and makes us think twice about flatly condemning them for their bigotry.
The timeline isn’t chronological – but the story still works. I honestly have no idea how Roy managed to construct a story of such complexity, told in such a daringly muddled order, and still ensure that it was moving and original to the very last. I suppose this is proof of her own statement that, ‘The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin.‘
The God of Small Things, then, is one of the Great Stories of our time.
The Roguish Apostrophe 