A Book Review on Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things”

A Book Review on Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things”

By Marian Denise G. Basallote

I. INTRODUCTION

A. About the Book

The God of Small Things (1997) is a politically charged novel by Indian author Arundhati Roy. It is a story about the childhood experiences of a pair of fraternal twins who become victims of circumstance. The book is a description of how the small things in life build up, translate into people's behavior and affect their lives. The book won the Booker Prize in 1997.

The God of Small Things is Roy's first book, and as of 2009, is her only novel. Completed in 1996, the book took four years to write. The potential of the story was first recognized by Pankaj Mishra, an editor with HarperCollins, who sent it to three British publishers. Roy received half-a-million pounds (approx. $970,000 USD) in advances, and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries.


B. About the Author

Full name: Suzanna Arundhati Roy

Born: November 24, 1961

Mother: Christian woman from Kerala

Father: Bengali Hindu tea planter, whom Roy barely knows and prefers not to speak about

Arundhati grew up in Aymanam, until she was 16 years old, when she ran away to live in a squatter's camp. She eventually attended the Dehli School of Architecture, and married a fellow student, Gerard Da Cunha. Four years later, the marriage ended and Roy took a job at the National Institute of Urban Affairs. A film director discovered her on the street, and she had a small role, but she got a scholarship to go to Italy to study architecture. While in Italy, Roy realized she was a writer and met her current husband. Together they wrote several TV scripts before Roy decided to focus on writing her book.

1997: God of Small Things is published to immediate acclaim, and wins the Booker Prize in England. Roy was the first Indian woman, and the first non-expatriate Indian to win the award.

1997: Also the 50th anniversary of India's independence from Britain.


II. SUMMARY OF THE CONTENT

A. Plot

The novel The God of Small Things reveals a young woman’s painful journey of recollection into her gloomy childhood. It tells about a mysterious love affair that is suppressed by the conventions of a society in India with the caste system deeply etched in its custom and traditions.

Rahel, the protagonist in the story, returns to her family home in Ayemenem after twenty-three years to find her long lost twin brother, Esthappen. Slowly, she recalls her childhood and the dreadful drama that has caused a drastic change in their lives. These memories mainly revolve around the roots and consequences of the tragic accidental death of her young cousin, Sophie Kochamma.

In their childhood, the young two-egg twins, Rahel and Estha, were inseparable, had a very special tie between them, and felt as if they were one and the same person. They lived with their mother, Ammu, along with their uncle, Chacko, grandmother, Mammachi, and grandaunt, Baby Kochamma. in the Kochamma family home. When Chacko learned that her former wife, Margaret, lost her second husband named Joe from a car accident, he invited her and her daughter, Sophie, to India.

The story reaches its climax when Mammachi finds out from Velutha’s father the forbidden love affair existing between Ammu and Velutha, an Untouchable or Paravan, who is a handyman around the Kochamma house and a trusted employee at the factory of the Paradise of Pickles and Preserves, owned by Mammachi. Mammachi, with rage and anger, locked Ammu in her room. Ammu got frustrated and quick-tempered with her children, sending them away.

Meanwhile, the twins, already feeling insecure with their mother's love, were severely affected by their mother's sharp words. The unexpected tragedy occurred when the twins, together with Sophie, ran to the river near the Kochamma family home late at night. With the boat that Velutha built for them, they decided to cross the river and to go to the abandoned house, known as the History House, situated on the other side. Their boat got turned over by the current. Fortunately, the twins, who have often swum in the river, survived and were able to reach the other side. Sophie, on the other hand, was drowned and was found dead the next morning by a fisherman.

In order to protect their family’s name and reputation, Baby Kochamma went to the police and accused Velutha of rape. She insinuated that he had abducted the children. The police set out to find Velutha, who coincidentally was with the twins on the other side of the river, particularly in the History House, where he and Ammu meet each night. When the police found Velutha, they beat him to death. Baby Kochamma cajoled the twins to falsely accuse Velutha by threatening them that something bad will happen to Ammu. Ammu tried to tell the police the truth after Sophie’s funeral, but it was too late.

Chacko, with a poisoned mind, expelled Ammu from the Kochamma home. Sad, sick and alone, Ammu died at the young age of thirty-one. To complete the cover-up, the twins were separated. Estha was sent away to Calcutta to live with his father, Baba, and his father's second wife as Rahel remained in the family home. After the tragic event, Estha became a withdrawn and reserved person who uttered no word at all and did not communicate with the rest of the world. He lived in his own silence. When his father worked abroad, for after so many years, he returned to Ayemenem. Likewise, Rahel felt a permanent emptiness inside her. At a young age, she went to live in Delhi and studied architecture. When her marriage with an American fell apart, she also returned to India, specifically to their old home in Ayemenem.

B. Characters

Ammu Kochamma

 She is Rahel and Estha’s mother. She is a beautiful and sardonic woman who has been victimized first by her father and then by her husband. While raising her children, she has become tense and repressed. She grew up in Delhi, but because her father said that college was an unnecessary expense for a girl, was forced to live with her parents when they moved to Ayemenem.

 Ammu’s latent “Unsafe Edge,” full of desire and “reckless rage,” emerges during Sophie Mol’s visit and draws her to Velutha. After the horrific climax to the affair, Ammu sent Estha to live with his father and left Rahel in the Ayemenem House. She looked for work, but lost a succession of jobs because of her illness. She died alone in a cheap hotel at the age of thirty-one.

Baby Kochamma

 Nicknamed “Baby,” Mammachi’s sister, Navomi Ipe Kochamma, is a judgmental old maid with tiny feet. She lived her life backwards as she renounced the material world when she was young, but became very materialistic when she was old. Throughout her life, she was an insecure, selfish, and vindictive person.

 During the time of Sophie Mol’s visit, she is a nuisance who pestered the twins because she disliked them and Ammu. She is later revealed to be cruel and insidious. In her old age, she became a bitter and lonely woman addicted to the television.

Chacko Kochamma

 He is Ammu’s intellectual and self-absorbed older brother. He was a charming but a very unclean Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He met Margaret while she was working in an Oxford café. Deeply in love with Margaret, in part because she never depended on him or adored him like a mother, he married her without telling his family. But after a year, she grows tired of his squalor within and divorces him.

 With his divorce and her daughter’s death, he grew fatter and became obsessed with balsawood airplanes, which he unsuccessfully attempted to fly. He was also unsuccessful at running the pickle factory, which started to lose money as soon as he attempted to expand the operation. A “self-proclaimed Marxist,” Chacko attempted to be a benevolent employer and even planned to organize a union among his own workers.

Estha Kochamma

 He is Rahel’s twin brother. He is a serious, intelligent, and somewhat nervous child who wears “beige and pointy shoes” and has an “Elvis puff.” His experience of the circumstances surrounding Sophie Mol’s visit is somewhat more traumatic than Rahel’s, beginning when he was sexually abused by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man at the Abhilash Talkies theater.

 He never went to college and acquired a number of habits, such as wandering on very long walks and obsessively cleaning his clothes. He was so close to his sister that the narrator describes them as one person, despite having been separated for most of their lives.

Mammachi Kochamma

 She is an elegant woman in her old age, although she is nearly blind. She is Rahel and Estha’s grandmother. Brutally beaten by her husband, she nevertheless cries at his funeral and shares many of his values, including an extremely rigid view of the caste system. She began the pickle factory and ran it successfully, and she was an “exceptionally talented” violinist. She loved Chacko with blind admiration and deeply disliked Margaret Kochamma. Nevertheless, she tolerates and even facilitates Chacko’s affairs with factory workers.

Margaret Kochamma

 She is Sophie Mol’s mother and Chacko’s ex-wife. She is from a strict, working-class London family and was working as a waitress in Oxford when she met Chacko. Marrying him because of his uncontrolled personality that made her feel free, Margaret soon realized that she did not need him to accept herself, and she divorced him. When her second husband Joe died, she accepted Chacko’s invitation to Ayemenem for Christmas, and she was haunted by this decision for the rest of her life.

Rahel Kochamma

 She is Ammu’s daughter and Estha’s younger sister by eighteen minutes. An intelligent and honest person who has never felt socially comfortable, she is something of a drifter, and several times the narrator refers to her as the quality “Emptiness.” When she was a girl, her hair sits “on top of her head like a fountain” and she always wears red-tinted plastic sunglasses with yellow rims.

 Although Ammu often chastises her for being dirty and unsafe, she loves her very deeply, and Rahel is equally devoted to her mother. She also loves Velutha and her brother, with whom she shares a “single Siamese soul.” She was traumatized by Sophie Mol’s drowning, Velutha’s death, and Ammu’s death. Although these events did not seem to deprive her of her quirkiness or brightness, they contributed to her sense of sadness and lack of direction in later life. She entered an architecture school but never finished the course, married an American named Larry McCaslin, and lived with him in Boston until they were divorced.

Kochu Maria

 She is the Kochamma family’s “vinegar-hearted, short-tempered, midget cook.” She does not speak any English and, although she has always “noticed everything,” she eventually stops caring about how the house looks and becomes addicted to television.

Sophie Mol

 She is Chacko and Margaret’s daughter. She is a frank and spirited English girl characterized by her bellbottoms and her go-go bag. Although the twins prejudged her because they have been insistently instructed about how to behave when she arrives, she managed to win them over. This was partly because she is charming and outgoing, and partly because she rejected the advances of Chacko, Mammachi, and Baby Kochamma in favor of befriending Rahel and Estha.

Velutha

 An Untouchable worker at the pickle factory and a close friend to Rahel and Estha, he was blamed for killing Sophie Mol and raping Ammu. But, in fact, he had nothing to do with Sophie Mol’s death. He carried on a brief yet passionate and voluntary affair with Ammu until Inspector Thomas Mathew’s police officers beat him to death.

 His name means “White” in Malayalam, so-called because he has such dark skin. Mammachi noticed his prodigious talents in making and fixing things when he was young and convinced his father to send him to the Untouchables’ School founded by her father-in-law. He became an accomplished carpenter and mechanic, and acquired an assurance that scared his father because it was inacceptable among Untouchables.

C. Themes

The God of Small Things is dominated by powerful themes pertaining to social discrimination, freedom suppression and oppression, family disintegration, and unpredictability of circumstances.

Social Discrimination
Velutha, an Untouchable worker at the pickle factory, assumed a low position only because of his social standing. He belonged to the Untouchable caste and thus, he was deprived of many other privileges that the others could enjoy. He was even accused of something he never did. He was beaten to death by the police even if they have not proven him guilty of rape. He lived in a society where injustice, prejudice, and inequality ruled over.

Freedom Suppression
Ammu and his twins were suppressed with freedom because of things they never intended to happen. Ammu fell in love with Velutha, who was way below her level, and so their illicit love affair was stopped immediately. She had no power and no voice at all to protest against her family, who thinks only of their name and reputation. She never had a choice to do what would make her happy. Her life was solely dictated by the conventions of the society that she lives in. When it comes to her twins, they were deprived of the freedom to love, to belong to a family, and to discover who they really were. They were confined in the barriers of frustration, emptiness, and misery.

Unpredictability of Circumstances
The precarious turn of events was evidently shown in the story. Ammu and Velutha extracted only one small promise from each other each time they parted because they knew that things could change in an instant. Estha experienced the quirk of fate when he, still on the verge of innocence, was sexually abused by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man. This brought him trauma and made two thoughts linger in his mind (“Anything can happen to anyone.” and “It is best to be prepared.”)


III. ANALYSIS OF TEXT

The God of Small Things is a highly stylized novel that tells the story of a very fractured family from the southernmost tip of India. Through flashbacks and flashforwards, it gradually unfolds the secrets of the characters’ unhappiness and misery in life. First-time novelist Arundhati Roy twists and reshapes language to create an arresting, startling sort of precision. The average reader of mainstream fiction may have a tough time working through Roy's prose, but those with a more literary bent to their usual fiction inclinations should find the initial struggle through the dense prose a worthy price for this lushly tragic tale.

The great pleasure of The God of Small Things flows from its language, and its delight in verbal comedy. Arundhati carefully played with words. One way she does this is through repeated phrases. Some of the most often repeated are "A viable, dieable age." and "Little Man. He lived in a caravan. Dum dum." Likewise, she regularly used symbols for depth and profundity. Roy’s use of language was so imaginative, vivid, eloquent, and convincing that it made us immerse in its creativity. Thus, I believe Roy exemplified the intelligent qualities of writing – logical, realistic, simple, clear, and persuasive.

As quoted by Roy, “It is not just about small things, it's about how the smallest things connect to the biggest things - that's the important thing. And that's what writing will always be about for me… I'm not a crusader in any sense.”


IV. EVALUATION

Personally, I enjoyed reading The God of Small Things and loved everything about it – the impressive style of the author in writing, complex storyline, and amazing characters. Moreover, I appreciated the lessons it had left behind and the values it had inculcated to its readers. I learned that a family’s support in one’s endeavors would always portray a crucial role in molding success in his/her life. I realized that anyone who becomes a victim of freedom suppression and oppression would always feel emptiness and misery in every fiber of his/her being. Lastly, I discovered that anything that we do could alter the course of our lives both in positive and negative ways. Earning four out of five stars, The God of Small Things is indeed an exquisite and outstanding novel written with truckloads of color, craft, and ambition.