The God of Small Things; a review

This novel draws you in with its charming prose, reminiscent of a distant, ethereal memory, hazily stored long ago in our minds. However, one cannot help but notice that there is an uneasy queasiness in our stomachs as the narrative progresses. Like a chronic disease, the symptoms are transient, but the dread and anxiety lingers.

Roy espouses her views of the world through the perspective of the young protagonists; the twins Rahel and Estha. Her observations are announced so innocently by the voices of babes that have an almost commanding objectivity to them. The twins' stream of consciousness when they enunciate words^[1] and observe the unspoken emotions of the adults they are surrounded by, is a fresh and artfully convincing substitute for an omniscient narrator.

I am of the opinion that thought-provoking literature (that this novel is) contain few delineations between good and evil. In fact, the only wicked being present is barely consequential to the tragedy, exemplifying Roy's message that our paths are not always our own to forge. In a perhaps overwrought way, each other person reaches their destiny by being swept by the current of culture, history and chance. From the caste-obsessed grandmother to the pitifully impotent servant, their tales play out the only way they could; true to their character.

"The God of Small Things" is a particularly subversive text in Roy's own nation given its controversial depiction of cross-caste interactions^[2]. The themes that Roy pursues are consistent with those in her collections of essays published in "Azadi"^[3]. I won't go into a great deal of detail here, however the tragedies in this novel nudge the reader into their own inquiry into the subcontinent. In the crosshairs in particular is India, whose internal conflicts of a political, cultural and religious nature are not as commonly discussed in the news as the internal conflicts of the nuclear powers whom the West are in a cold^[4] conflict with.

Roy weaves her understanding of context, motives and prejudice into a tale whose course of events, in its finality, feel as predetermined as the course of a river.