Pros: beautiful, detailed, prose; masterly use of language; vivid evocation of childhood; excellent characterization
Cons: foreshadowing sustained throughout entire novel--can be frustrating to some readers
The Bottom Line: An exceptional first novel that explores the far-reaching ramifications of love and loss, loyalty and betrayal, while evoking, brilliantly, the essence of childhood. Highly deserving of the Booker prize.
jc_hall's Full Review: Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things
Rahel and Estha are fraternal twins living on sufferance at their grandparents’ home, the old and rambling Ayemenem House. Their fatherless status stigmatises them, at least in the eyes of their malicious great-aunt. But their mother, Ammu, despite the stigma of being divorced and forced to return to live under her parents’ roof, is spirited and strong-willed, and spars verbally with her brother, the twins’ amiable, Oxford-educated uncle, Chacko. When Chacko’s ex-wife brings their daughter Sophie for a visit, tensions run high as Mammachi, the son-obsessed Matriarch, simmers, and everyone marvels openly at the half-white child.
Ammu’s discontent with her life and those surrounding her makes her seek comfort in the least likely of places, setting off a chain of events that have tragic and far-reaching consequences. For Kerala is a small place where old prejudices die hard, and when people dare act as if their place in society is not pre-ordained, they are forced to pay for their presumption. Caught in the centre of a storm not of their own making, the twins are torn between loyalty and betrayal, and forced to choose between the appalling and the unthinkable.
A remarkable first novel from the pen of screenplay-writer Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things is about love in all its ramifications and uncertainties. Familial love, maternal love, parental love, fraternal love, romantic love—all these are touched upon, each with its own intricacies and particularities. The novel is also about loss, be it the almost imperceptible loss of love in the gradual dissolution of a marriage, or the sudden, shocking loss of innocence in an instant.
The novel’s structure is anything but linear, weaving back and forth from the past to the present and back again, countless times, but the transitions are handled with skill and subtlety, and are not, for the most part, too abrupt. The story is told mostly from the children, Rahel and Estha’s points of view, and also from the point of view of Rahel as an adult. The prose is vivid and evocative and playful (the insistent wordplay, which this reader considers inspired, has, strangely, been subject to much criticism), the author managing to capture the essence of childhood in all its senses, colours and textures, so much so that the reader is fully immersed in the lives of and identifies wholly with the twins as they play and worry and make childish mischief. Their playfulness, their delight in the world around them, their fragility (of mind and spirit), their worry about who loves them and how much they are loved—(The Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.)—imbue the characters with authenticity and poignancy.
That the novel is a tragedy is clear from the start, but the foreshadowing lasts the entire length of the novel, a feat as well-sustained and as masterly as the author’s use of language. Details and full explanations are not given until the very end, leading the reader to keep reading in some anxiety to find out what exactly happened. Despite the sadness permeating much of the novel, The God of Small Things bears re-reading, to allow the reader a chance to appreciate the author’s skill in constructing a complex and compelling story, a technical excellence revealed only perhaps on a second reading, for the first is taken wholly with a story that appeals equally to the intellect, the senses, and the heart.
Fully deserving of the Booker Prize—highly recommended.
Sagas Fiction - Dazzling...remarkable. A novel that turns out to be as subtle as it is powerful. --The New York Times This outstanding novel is a banq...More at Barnes and Noble
Set against a background of political turbulence in Kerala, this novel tells the story of twins Esthappen and Rahel. Amongst the vats of banana jam an...More at Alibris
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