The God of Small Things (Paperback)

Things unfold in the Ayemenem House, now mossy, soaky and dusty, but once the symbol of pride for the Syrian Christian clan. Here, the characters inch towards their doomed destinies. Things culminate with the arrival of Sophie Mol with her mother Margaret Kochamma, to visit her `biological father,' Chacko. A stealthy jaunt, masterminded by her cousins Estha and Rahel, climaxes in her death by drowning. This incident, alongwith the exposed rendezvous of Ammu, the divorced daughter of the house with an low caste menial, lets loose all kinds of passions, rage, trickery and madness. Expulsions, separations and deaths follow, turning the place to a phantom of its old glory.

The old house had a fatal attraction about it. Every character returned there -- defeated, deserted and drained by the big, bad world, where they had dispersed earlier. The parallel here is all too discernible to miss -- of the returning Malayalees from their "unhappy" working places in the Gulf.

But once back to Ayemenem House, the characters are trapped -- just like the small bird in the Plymouth, which, unable to find a way out of the car, dies there. All these, seen through the innocent eyes of Estha and Rahel, give a coat of freshness to the narrative. The children's perspective, apart from the overdose of similes and contrived usages, sustain the readers' interests in the small things Lenin, the young son of communist schemer K N M Pillai, for instance, is described as `dressed like a taxi' because of his yellow shirt and black pants. Arundhati Roy's super sensitive antenna catches all the tiny details of her landscape -- and the thick, wet Kerala countryside has plenty to offer. The `farting slush' does not escape her, nor does the `funnel cap' created by mosquitoes over people's heads.

It is not the story element of The God of Small Things that is its strong point, but the language. The language characterised by a strange cadence -- plenty of capitals, joined words and phrases, pranky childish distortions -- supports the jerky unfolding of the story. The narration too is not linear but moves back and forth in time, each chapter briefly touching upon what has gone before or what is in store. These techniques pervade the whole story, even in describing the poignant moments like Ammu's cremation, Estha's separation from his mother and his witnessing the police interrogation. "My thoughts and language are the same things," says Arundhati Roy in an interview. "The book is not based on research, but is about some very raw, private things. It is more about human biology than human history ---- our nature is capable of extreme brutality, extreme love," she adds. As she rightly said, The God of Small Things was `a work of instinct.' She was not searching for a story, `the narrative and the structure slowly revealed itself and the book was written `sentence by sentence.' Therefore, the reader realises very soon that he can't skip over passages: every sentence has to be read and reread to get the flavour of her prose.

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Having said all that, I confess to loving non-linear narrative. If you don't like it, you probably won't think much of this book.

Finally, and coincidentally, just before I read The God of Small Things I read Green English, by linguist Loreto Todd. It's a nonfiction book and I won't go into her thesis. But at one point she suggests that some of the best literature of the 20th century comes from countries where one language (usually a colonizing language, as in India, Ireland, New Zealand, numerous African countries...) has overlaid and been adapted to fit an earlier language, pushing the boundaries of expression. This book seems to me to be a prime example of that idea.