The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
Summary
Rahel and Estha are two egg twins, a girl and a boy, growing up in Ayemenem in Kerala in 1969 in a family that owns a pickle factory. Their mother Ammu is divorced, which in that place and time is a permanent disgrace. Their great aunt Baby Kochamma is bitter about a priest she loved decades ago. Their grandmother is deaf and plays the violin badly.
Into this arrives Sophie Mol, their English cousin, for Christmas. Within a fortnight Sophie Mol is dead, a man named Velutha has been beaten to death by police, the twins have been separated, and the family has agreed on a version of events that will hold for twenty three years.
Roy tells it out of order, circling the two weeks from a present in which the twins are thirty one and reunited, so you know the outcome long before you understand it. The prose invents freely, capitalises for emphasis, repeats phrases like refrains and uses children's language for adult horror.
Velutha is an untouchable, and the Love Laws that decide who may be loved and how much are the book's subject. It is beautiful and it is devastating, and readers who dislike it usually dislike the style, which is unmistakable from the first page.
Read twenty pages before deciding. The chronology is deliberately scrambled and the invented compounds and capitalisations either delight you or do not. For readers who take to it, this is among the most rewarding debut novels of the last fifty years.
Historical Context & Significance
The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997. It was Arundhati Roy's first novel and she was the first Indian woman to win the prize.
The book was an immediate global bestseller and made her internationally famous within months. It also brought a criminal complaint in Kerala accusing her of obscenity over the final chapter, a case that took years to resolve.
Roy then did not publish another novel for twenty years, turning instead to political essays on dams, nuclear weapons, Kashmir and Maoist insurgency that made her a divisive public figure in India in a way the novel alone never would have. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness finally appeared in 2017 and was longlisted for the same prize, twenty years after the debut that had made further novels seem inevitable.