The God of Small Things, novel written by Arundhati Roy, published in 1997, that vividly and poetically recounts the downfall of a family while exploring issues regarding politics, race, religion, and class. The ambitious work is Roy’s first novel, and it won the Booker Prize.
The God of Small Things is set in Kerala in the 1960s, and it follows matriarch Ammu’s family through both ordinary and tragic events, focusing most memorably on her “two-egg twins,” Estha and Rahel. The accidental death by drowning of a visiting English cousin has a pivotal effect on their young lives. The novel is told in nonlinear time through a jigsaw of vivid encounters and descriptions, recounted in exquisite prose. The reader pieces together a childhood world that is interrupted by adult tragedies and their effect on Velutha, the twins’ friend who belongs to India’s Dalit caste.
Roy’s style has drawn comparisons to that of Salman Rushdie, yet her prose is distinctly rhythmic and poetic, and the overall effect is unique in its sensuality. A perhaps more apt reference point might be E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, in the way that Roy evokes the strange and lawless beauty of the natural world as both the counterpoint and the cause of human order and its sometimes brutal interpretations. Her strength lies in the quirky clarity with which she renders the mind of the child and the emotional force she creates in the various relationships.
The political concerns in The God of Small Things revolve around the notion of who decides “who should be loved and how much,” with Roy’s imaginative transgressions designed not so much to shock as to move the reader. A political figure who has championed the cause of the oppressed, Roy is concerned with the small powers of the human, powers that are shocking in their ability to redeem and destroy. She sacrifices neither structure, complexity, nor beautiful prose to convey her beliefs. The God of Small Things is a challenge to others who have attempted to tell us what love means.