Paul Bryant's Reviews > The God of Small Things

The big thing about The God of Small Things is the prose, it’s quite something. To be more specific, it’s phosphorescent, forensic, moist, listopian, inflammable, jubilant, childlike, zygotic, hierophantic, susurrant, daemonical, yeasty, garrulous, exact, oleaginous, quaggy, kleptomaniacal, newlyminted, refulgent, blinding, xenogamic, wounding, vulpine, uncanny and taxonomical but allegedly never aleatory.

Buried under and squirreled away in the middle of this great mass of mostly (beautiful, confounding) child-eye-vision noticing and describing is a knot of connected violence (random and intended), the engorged heart of the matter, that throws various lives round as you might expect. Readers have to be patient, this is not about plot, it’s about how a writer can arrive out of nowhere and at age 35 publish a first novel that creates a bidding war then knocks everyone out and then wins the Booker Prize.

After that, by the way, there was (fictional) silence .

SOME AUTHORS WHO TOOK A WHILE TO FOLLOW UP THEIR SUCCESSFUL FIRST NOVEL

Joseph Heller – 13 Years (Catch-22 1961 to Something Happened 1974)
Marilyn Robinson – 24 years (Housekeeping 1980 to Gilead 2004)

And the champ

Henry Roth – 60 years (Call It Sleep 1934 to Mercy of a Rude Stream 1994)

Ms Roy is in the middle, she only took 20 years to follow up The God of Small Things with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

But back to this extraordinary book. Here’s a flavour of what you are going to get. First a description of how one character descends into muteness:

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there.

But a whole lot of this book, maybe most, is seen through the eyes of two children aged seven, so we have a lot of almost Joycean weirdness like this:

Estha saw how Baby Kochamma’s neckmole licked its chops and throbbed with delicious anticipation. Der-Dboom, Der-Dboom. It changed color like a chameleon. Der-green, der-blueblack, dermustardyellow. Twins for tea It would bea.

And we have many, many little lists too :

Then the policemen looked around and saw the grass mat.
The pots and pans.
The inflatable goose.
The Qantas koala with loosened button eyes.
The ballpoint pens with London’s streets in them.
Socks with separate colored toes.
Yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses.
A watch with the time painted on it.

SIMILEWATCH

As usual I like to spot the funny similes that authors love to heap up, it’s like some of ‘em think similes are what writing a novel is for. Here are some favorites (my own little list) :

Like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant
Like substandard mattress-stuffing
Like shining beads on an abacus
Like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just been
Like lumpy knitting
Like hairy cannonballs
Like an unfriendly jewelled bear
Like sub-tropical flying-flowers
Like an absurd corbelled monument that commemorated nothing
Like a press of eager natives petitioning an English magistrate


INDIAN WRITERS

For me they divide into the plain

R K Narayan
Rohinton Mistry
Adiga Aravind
Sunjeev Sahota
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

And the flowery

Salman Rushdie
Nadeem Aslam
Kiran Desai
And
Arundhati Roy

Which is not to say that the plain can’t turn a delightful phrase or the flowery can’t think up a decent story.

I CONFESS I AM A LITTLE SURPRISED

That The God of Small Things gets so much readerlove as it does. It’s eccentric and often confusing, maddeningly detailed and slow-burning and I can imagine it won’t be everybody’s bright green mocktail with a paper umbrella. The 336 pages can read like 500 at times, because there’s an intricate (disrupted, fractured) sequence of events and understandings to be fitted together, and the author takes her own time.

So, I know it won the Booker Prize, but don’t let that put you off.