“Who should be loved, and how, and how much?”
The God of Small Things explores this question from the innocent point of view of a pair of seven year old fraternal twins. At the same time, one of those twins explores it in retrospect as an adult with the understanding she didn’t have when the family tragedy unfolded.
Set in Kerala, India in the 1960’s, a middle-class Syrian-Christian family stumbles through the complexities of Communism, caste, and love. Some love has been lost, some rejected, some misplaced, and some misunderstood. Almost all of it “breaks the rules” in some way (as love often does.)
It would be difficult to drop any spoilers for The God of Small Things. Instead of surprising the reader with a plot twist, Roy creates a weird haunting tension by showing you the Big events first. After you already know the spoilers, she backtracks to disclose the events leading up to them. It is those events, those “small things” that hold the real importance.
The story does not unfold in flashback. Instead, Roy uses prismatic timeline. There are shards of the past and present laying all over the pages and you see them reflected in each other in an erie way. Admittedly, this makes it a challenging read at times, but Roy takes good care of the reader and delivers a complete story with heartbreaking detail and gives you fully developed, if flawed, characters that you can’t help but love and root for.
For example:
“What was it that gave Ammu this unsafe edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber.”
“Adoor Basi wasn’t trying to attract attention. He was only trying to deserve the attention that he had already attracted.”
“His light-brown eyes were polite yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife.”
I loved the characters, though I did find it a bit overwhelming to meet everyone at once during a funeral for pretty little Sophie Mol. (Not a spoiler. She’s dead from page one. Though through Roy’s magical prismatic storyline, you do still get to know her.) The entire family is dumped into the reader’s brain in a cacophony of human longing to be loved. Roy makes us children. We see without understanding and realization dawns over us as we mature in the story. It’s really a poetic and beautiful way to experience the novel.
If you think you might loose patience, you might not enjoy it as much as I did. I do strongly recommend The God of Small Things but I also recommend reading it when you are really able to invest yourself in it. This is not a light beach read. It is meant to be read lovingly. “It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.”
<cover art shared under fair use from Penguin Random House>