Babe in Arms’ last meeting in Leominster Library took place on 6th November, when we discussed The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Everybody who attended on Thursday had finished the book and it got an enthusiastic response. It wasn’t considered an easy read by any stretch, and as previous contributions to the blog indicate, a lot of people find it hard going for the first 100 pages or so, until you get into the swing of the language and the shifting timelines of the story.
The God of Small Things is the story of an illicit inter caste relationship in late 1960s Kerala, and the devastating effect of the fallout on several characters: the twins Rahel and Esta and their half Indian, half English cousin Sophie Mol, their mother Ammu, and the Untouchable Velutha to name but a few. It is clear from the beginning that the story is tragic and that several of the protagonists won’t survive till the end of the novel, and those that do, don’t manage to come away unscathed. But the story is told with freshness and exuberance and humour as well, having as a dynamic the innocence of the twins and their childish misapprehensions and excitements.
Some of us had read the book years ago, about ten years ago in my case, and had looked forward to reading it again. I’m not great for reading books twice…I don’t have the patience, and so it’s great to get a chance to do so for a reading group. My memory of it was very vague, leading me to wonder if I had even understood it properly the first time round; my prevailing memory is of an extraordinarily rich novel, seething with life and death and corruption, rather like the swamps leading down to the river where much of the action takes place. Two of our readers have been to Kerala and they both agreed that Roy had brought something vital of the place in her descriptions of it, the dust that caked everything and the damp that made the place swell in the monsoon.
Our discussion easily filled up the hour allotted for the meeting; there was no sense of having run out of things to say about it, and even throughout the hour new ideas about what had happened in the story occurred to us, which proves the value of a group discussion. From the obvious elements within the story such as the humour and the awful tragedy we were led to a very interesting chat about death and how it’s treated in different cultures! One reader also said she felt that some elements in the writing reminded her of Irish writing in a way, which of course I thought was interesting; its lyrical quality perhaps, and the sense that you are reading in a particular idiom, one that might take you some time to get your eye into so to speak.
Another reader felt very strongly the feminist motivation behind the novel; which may not be surprising as Roy is the daughter of a well-known women’s right’s activist. It’s frustrating to see the waste of Ammu’s life; fleeing an oppressive family environment where her father beats her mother brutally and her clever but lazy brother can do no wrong, she runs into marriage with an alcoholic, and has twins, and when she can take the indignities of that marriage no longer she returns home to find that as a divorcee she is considered by her family to be shaming and worthless, and her children are somehow tarred with the same brush. Interestingly the prime mover in this blackening of Ammu’s name is her aunt Baby Kochamma, an unsympathetic character if ever there was one, whose own disappointment in love many years before has festered within her to render her a bitter, nasty old woman.
When it comes to light that Ammu has had an affair with Velutha it is hard to know whether it is disgust or jealousy or more probably a mixture of both that makes Baby Kochamma steer the events following it towards disaster. But if the events seemed to everybody at the time to spiral out of control, with hindsight the twins could see the shadow of their aunt pulling strings behind the scenes, first of all to blight Ammu’s chance of happiness, next to clear the family’s name by accusing Velutha falsely of attacking her, then to blame Ammu and the twins for the death of Sophie Mol and finally to convince the twins that they had to renounce Velutha or Ammu would go to jail.
The blighted lives of the twins as they were reunited many years later under her baleful eye in the now festering house of their upbringing is one of the saddest things about this book, and while it wouldn’t have solved anything, it made me wish for a bit of gratuitous violence towards Baby Kochamma. But the fact that she would carry the pain of her unfulfilled love to the grave with her made me feel a bit better, though it shouldn’t because it was probably that which caused the trouble in the first place!
We all agreed that the most sympathetic character in the story, apart from the twins, was Velutha himself. He did so much for the family that was taken for granted or not recognised. The caste system is difficult to get our heads around in this part of the world, it seems so much more fundamental and engrained than the class system which we cannot deny in this country. But it even overrode the comradely overtures of the local communist party, which is of course supposed to be above all that. It must be admitted it didn’t take much to override the modern leanings of Chacko with his plans to unionise his factory and sign up his workers to the communist party, but still took a feudal-type advantage of his power over any of his pretty female workers, while his adoring mother turned a blind eye. One can’t help wondering what might have happened if Ammu or Velutha would have had the educational advantages Chacko had enjoyed.
The stylised nature of the writing appealed to me very much on this second reading…the little rhymes the children had going round their heads for example, but also the stylised nature of the plot. It occurred to me as Rahel and Estha sat through a Kathikali performance that Roy’s explanation of it explained her own novel as well: that although you knew what would happen it didn’t take away from, rather it added to your involvement in the story.
This was Roy’s first novel, and she donated her Booker Prize money to the Stop the Narmada Dam project in India. Since then she has contributed to and edited collections of essays, mainly to do with activism and politics, and she has also written some screenplays. Her main contributions have been as an activist herself, and she has proved an admirable thorn in the sides of India’s major political parties. In 2007 she said she would start on another novel. We look forward to reading that when it appears. It took her four years to write The God of Small Things; I’m sure the next one will be worth the wait.
