The lives of the main characters are all humble ones, consumed with the minor precedences of birth and the allotted female role in life. Here many generations of Matriarchs, due to harsh circumstance and personal character, have had to forge their own individual way. In a society that enshrines frowning and disapproval upon the efforts of women to be independent of men. Hanging over all this the self-limiting spectre of caste. The opening of the novel is a gathering of this widely dispersed family at Ammu's parental home in Ayemenem. A place to which everyone returns to at some point. It also begins with the accidental tragic death of a young girl Sophie Mol. What happened that evening is unspoken of, but haunts the subsequent narrative.
Ammu is a single Mother bringing up two wild twin children Rahel and Esthappen, who are inseparable, and through their eyes we are often witnessing what takes place. Ammu's Mother Mammachi runs a company Paradise Pickles.& Preserves. On the death of her abusive husband Pappachi, its expanded beyond all likely profitability by her Anglophile and Oxford educated son Chacko. Who like all spoiled Indian sons possesses an unearned optimism, coupled with an unsinkable confidence. A Grand Aunt, nicknamed Baby Kochamma, is so badly scarred by early disappointment in love, she always has a soured word for everyone, about everything. And there is Chacko's ex-wife, Margaret who behaves as though she is still married to him, the English Mother of their much lionised daughter Sophie Mol. Whose imminent arrival in Ayemenem is greatly anticipated in the first chapter.
There is an elliptical form to the storytelling here. It mimics how we remember things in fragments, and not consecutively. Roy takes us on subtle journeys, gently circling back and forth in time, and over the same territory. Before and after events that determine the form of the future. Events you only see the causes of in later flashbacks. Initially, I wasn't sure I grasped what the tone and dramatic tenure this novel was laying claim to. Its unique quality does slowly dawn upon you. As a sequence of odd and genuinely touching events are recounted. The novel casts this bewitching spell, that is ripe with mystery and full of a magical innocent charm. You begin to love these characters, when they are so fondly and vividly written, With their curious mix of the gregariously eccentric and quiet confused humility. The story is more of a melange of happenstance, punctuated by unfortunate deaths.
Two thirds of the way through reading The God of Small Things, I found my interest in this rambling collage of incident, family myth, gods and tragedy did start to wane. Too much lingering, too much vague meandering, too much evasive disguising of the facts. Unsure perhaps of how to pull all this together or whether to pull it together at all. Then suddenly it does so, quite rapidly, drawing all the deliberately left ragged threads into a cohesive end to it all. It does so in an uncharacteristically systematic manner. One that has not been present the entire length of the novel so far. The stylistic form the novel adopted, changes in order to better inform you how Sophie Mol died. This is the one place where its chosen stylistic consistency does wobble slightly. When Roy felt she had to stop all her folksy tangential tossing of the story line like a salad, in order to fully resolve it. Closing with the touching forbidden affair between two lovers from separate castes, the one that set their lives afire.
The novel, despite abjuring a coherent through narrative, does holds ones attention. But for me, I never felt quite fully captivated and owned by it. It takes place within a very particular period of Indian society, Post the Empire and Partition, when India has to rediscover and reformulate itself, where the old and the new clash. This whole story is infused with a softly spoken tragedy, hidden behind the curtain of often petty familial resentments. Arundhat Roy carries this off with skillful confidence, and writes with great evocative strength. Sure footed in most of the literary choices she makes. It is a quietly impressive debut novel that, unsurprisingly, made her career..
CARROT REVIEW - 5/8
No comments:
Post a Comment