Though many novels have been written about India's emergence into the modern world, few are as potent as The God of Small Things, the 1997 winner of the Man Booker Prize. For Ms. Roy has reached beyond a simple snapshot of Indian life, as seen through the eyes of a middleclass family, and, ambitiously, sought to contextualize modern India by connecting it to its recent past. In this, she exposes the social, political and economic forces that have been at work in India and the extent to which those forces contort and cripple the lives they touch.
Cycling between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, The God of Small Things patiently and devastatingly details the harrowing lives of twins, Estha and Rahel. Born to a witty but world-weary mother, Ammu, who is the regular and stoic victim of her husband's violent, alcohol-fuelled abuse, brother and sister experience life with openness and curiosity, embracing their extended family with innocence and grace. But when, aged seven years, they find themselves at the center of two deaths, one accidental and the other quite purposeful, their lives are forever changed. In the wake of these terrible crimes, the twins are ordered to tell lies for the sake of the family, blamed for its misfortunes, and then finally separated, with Estha banished abroad and Rahel jailed at home. When, 24 years on, they are reunited in India, Estha is a shadow of a man who has sworn himself to silence and Rahel is a haunted failure who has ventured to and returned from the United States with little to show for her years. Together, they attempt to piece together their sundered pasts and heal what was so cruelly broken.
Devoting most of her energy to the 1960s timeline, Ms. Roy couples her lyrical prose with vivid descriptions of mid-century India to produce a near-tangible recreation of a place in time. Through Rahel and Estha, one can feel the chaos of an airport, the terror of a movie theatre, the beauty of their family estate, and the fear of a police station and the extent to which all of these places hold life-altering significance for the fate-battered twins. But as much as one can admire her striking scenery, Ms. Roy's animated characters, and her willingness to throw all of life's cruelties at them, imbue her work with vitality. From the twins who are crushed by fate's bootheel, to their great aunt's selfish cruelty, to their mother's grim endurance, to their uncle's hopeless self-absorption, each member of the family, and the creatures who act for and against them, have distinct personalities that run the gamut from sweetness to cruelty.
The God of Small Things is far from a perfect read. It is, at times, needlessly dense and opaque, indulging in numerous and pointless digressions into a spiritualism that offers little to the story's central plot. However, Ms. Roy's ability to, with artistry and subtlety, demonstrate the extent to which human lives are molded by external influences they cannot control, by bitternesses they cannot suppress, and by desires they cannot ignore, elevates The God of Small Things into rarified air. Tragic and thoughtful work. (4/5 Stars)
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