This highly stylized novel tells the tale of a turbulent, patrician, Syrian Christian family from a small town in Kerala, in the southernmost tip of India.The plot centers on the seven year old fraternal twins Esthappen (Estha) and Rahel and is told from the point of view of Rahel.
A strange and eccentric cast of characters rounds out the family with whom Estha and Rahel live. There is Blind Mammachi, the twins' grandmother and founder of Paradise Pickles and Preserves. Blind Mammachi is a virtuous violin-playing widow who suffered years of unwarranted abuse at the hands of her highly-respected husband and who now has a fierce one-sided Oedipal connection with her son, Chacko.
There is Estha and Rahel's grandaunt, Baby Kochamma, who totters on air cushions for feet while playing out the bitterness of her lifetime of unrequited love for an Irish Roman Catholic priest; she even converted to Catholicism in order to win him...just as he was converting to Hinduism. Now, a spiteful, spirited spinster, Baby Kochamma spends her days savoring soap operas and satellite television wrestling matches.
And then, there is Velutha, the title character, an ebulliently talented handyman, tainted by his Paravan lineage.
Chacko, who is now divorced from his English wife and who hasn't seen his baby daughter since her infancy, runs Paradise Pickles and Preserves with the iron hand of what he deludes himself into thinking is communism, even as he flirts with and beds his female employees.
The twins' mother, Ammu, is a divorcee (and a devotee of divorce), who fled her tyrannical husband's alcoholism and incessantly insistent demands, and yet Ammu, herself, is a wilfull woman with a wickedly wild side that will prove to be the undoing of both herself and her unsuspecting family. A feminist before feminism, Ammu cannot decide on a last name, because as she says, "choosing between her husband's name and her father's name didn't give a woman much of a choice." At all.
Roy's characters are both fun and funny because "They broke all the rules. They crossed into forbidden territory. They tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam and jelly jelly." With the exception if Ammu and Chacko, though, they are, unfortunately, made of plaster already filled with cracks and holes and ready to crumble, rather than solidly constructed of flesh and blood and, therefore, they suffer the fate of the not-very-believable.
The tragedy in this book revolves around the visit of Chacko's ex-wife, now a willing widow courtesy of her second husband, and Chacko's daughter, Sophie Mol. Together this eclectically and fatally-fractured family will endure an inexorable egress toward disillusion, madness, guilt, betrayal and death. Lives, of course, will be forever fragmented as the one aspect all the characters share is their own vulnerability; the ability to be physically and psychologically wounded.
Lovers of Hemingway should definitely eschew this book, for this is no linear, spare story. A densely-woven tapestry made of constantly undulating, heavily-layered plots and lush torrents of newly-minted words and phrases, The God of Small Things is told in flashbacks and flashforwards and twists and turns that are as fresh and original as a newly-hybridized tomato, straight off the vine. This is good, brilliant even, when there is a story to tell. The God of Small Things, however, might just be a little short on story and a little long on style.
Although Roy's dazzlingly daunting and agile ability to turn a phrase cannot be denied, it is her breathtaking aptitude for summing up a damaged life in one or two felicitous phrases that constitutes her major talent, for instance, the description of the great-grandmother's portrait: "With her eyes she looked in the direction her husband looked. With her heart she looked away." Or, "Baby Kochamma had lived her life backwards. As a young woman she renounced the material word, and now, as an old one, she seemed to embrace it. She hugged it and it hugged her back."
As brilliant and original as this book is, it is certainly not a masterpiece. Despite its fine, often heady, writing, there remains something of the formulaic about it. Evocative and sensual descriptions aside, the tragedy that occurs and the love affair that ensues are both predictable and implausible, in part, because they spring from neither characterization nor the needs of the unfolding (sort-of) non-plot.
The word play and the all-pervasive use of children's lingo, devices that serve to make the beginning of the novel sparkle and shine like sunshine on sea water, begin to wear as thin as a poor man's watered-down gruel after one hundred pages (more or less), and become both predictable and tedious.
And, of course, there are several scenes (the most glaring taking place in a theatre) that seem quite gratuitous, something that Roy seemed to have inserted simply to shock for shock's sake. In a day and age when nothing shocks but the unvarnished truth (and even then, not always), these scenes are simply irritating and definitely detract from the would-be charms of the novel.
The bottom line, for most readers, will not be the plot, or even the lack thereof, but their view of Roy's original prose style. Is it ostentatious or is it brilliant? Readers who find The Old Man the Sea the pinnacle of style should probably stay away. But those who enjoy working their way with a machete through a veritable forest of a book, filled with lush, densely-growing undergrowth, should find The God of Small Things nothing short of fantastic.
Although my own novelist wife loved the stylistic devices used in this novel, I thought the book contained some major flaws. First, I do want to say that it is obvious that Ms. Roy is a writer of considerable talent and imagination, but she is not a natural storyteller a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think she needs a little more experience and discipline, that's all.All of the characters except two were quite wooden and cardboard. Ms. Roy certainly did not make good use of the third person subjective in letting us into the minds and hearts of the people she wanted us to know.
Also, while other, more experienced writers can, and have, gone back and forth in time successfully (Toni Morrison springs to mind instantly), this type of nonlinear storytelling takes much planning and effort. It seems as though Ms. Roy was simply not up to the task--yet!
And, I thought a novel was supposed to let you know what the story was about in the first paragraph, if not the first sentence? When I was reading page one hundred, I found myself thinking, "But what is the story about! "
The stylistic devices employed were, at times, irritating, but I could have gotten past this if only the story itself had been compelling enough, which it just wasn't.
No matter how much my gorgeous wife loved the style and tone, I find I can only give the book three stars, and even that is pushing it!
I would, however, be willing to try another book of Ms. Roy's when she gains a little more experience in the technique of storytelling.
