There are plenty of websites that claim to be able to teach you how to write a novel. I haven’t investigated them in any detail, but I know that they offer guidance on how to structure the plot of one’s novel – of course they do. I have a strong hunch that one of the plot structures they suggest (if they don’t, they really should) would consist of parallel timelines following the novel’s characters in the present,
alternating with chapters set much earlier, before a significant event which marks a turning point in their lives. In the present they look back on said formative event with regret, perhaps not having been able to move on with their lives, still haunted by the past etc; in the past they approach the event with no idea what is coming, blithely unaware of how their lives are to be changed forever. We the reader will know and can see the innocent steps they take towards disaster through the prism of that knowledge, perhaps guided by a wistful ‘little did I know’ narrator. Better still, keep the detail of the ‘event’ vague – tease the reader with the idea that something terrible or disastrous is about to happen, but leave the details to the novel’s climax.
Does that sound familiar? Would you want to read a novel with that structure? Or does it sounds a little like writing by numbers, following a formula that you have read a thousand times before. It’s a little more interesting that a simple chronological series of events, but it has its flaws. For a start there is really not that much suspense – we know something is going to happen which will change our characters’ lives, even if we don’t know what precisely that event is, and we know more importantly that they come through it alive if not unscathed. Reading the novel becomes a matter of waiting for the ‘event’ to be revealed. That, in a nutshell, was my experience of reading The God of Small Things. It felt too mannered, too much like an exercise in creative writing, too artificial. It prevented me from becoming immersed in the text and in believing in the characters. Which was obviously a pity, because the author clearly has immense potential.
The God of Small Things is a classically fragmented narrative. It is constructed around two periods in the lives of twins Estha and Rahel: in 1969 when they are seven, and then in 1993 when they finally reunite after the traumatic incident that forms the heart of the novel. The twins come from a wealthy, Syrian-Christian family living in India and in the 1969 storyline live in an extended family with their mother Ammu, grandmother Mammachi, uncle Chacko, and great-aunt ‘Baby’ Kochamma. The narrative uses multiple perspectives and voices, but principally is shown through the naïve eyes of the children. The tragic events are set in motion when Margaret Kochamma, uncle Chacko’s ex-wife, comes to visit the family from England with her daughter, Sophie Mol. We learn as early as page 4 that Sophie dies in the course of the visit, but how she comes to die, and who is held responsible for her death, is not explained until towards the end of the novel.
In the present, the trauma of Sophie’s death, and the twins’ subsequent separation, still echoes. They both return to the family home, now much run-down, and resume an adult version of their childhood existence.
Roy’s prose is dense and at times wonderful. It is not unusual for her to use three images in one sentence. They can when this happens become crowded and lose their impact. Take this example from the novel’s first page for instance:
“It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, ploughing it up like gunfire.”
Can ropes be like gunfire? Technically no, but of course the mind is agile enough to move from the initial metaphor (slanting silver ropes) to the simile (like gunfire) without being concerned with the apparent contradiction, in the same way we have no problem with Hamlet taking arms against a sea of troubles. Notice also the dead metaphor (ploughing) lurking there in between the two more obvious images. Out of context like this the writing stands out – we can see the monsoon rain slanting down and hitting the dry earth, pitting it with holes, but the cumulative effect of the imagery can be a bit wearying. When Roy avoids trying to assure the reader than everything is like something else, and just allows things to be what they are, the prose is far more effective:
“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air.”
Compare this to when the imagery takes over:
“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. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past.”
The novel’s Romeo and Juliet storyline, in which the taboo against relationships between Touchables and Untouchables is broken, is intertwined with the children’s excited memories of going to the cinema to see the Sound of Music, driving in the family car, and playing in the grounds of the family home. Here the river at the end of the garden represents a border between order and chaos, the known and the unknown, civilisation and barbarism. Once the reader acclimatises to the novel’s splintered structure it becomes as absorbing read – we know tragedy is about to strike but need to understand how and why. I have to say I found the novel’s ending its weakest element. It was gratuitous, a way of abruptly bringing the novel to a close when the story had run its course. But although the relationship between the twins is ostensibly the heart of the novel, there are many other themes, characters and relationships that were of greater interest and which outweigh the disappointing conclusion.
The God of Small Things (I should confess now that I still don’t properly understand what or who the titular God of Small Things was) is a wonderfully rich and rewarding novel. Perhaps it is too easy to mock some of the more obvious elements of ‘creative writing’ as I have done in the opening paragraphs of this review (John Crace does an excellent job of parodying the novel’s excesses in this review in the Guardian). And it is fair to say that it won the Booker in an exceptionally weak year (you are unlikely to have heard of any of the other short-listed novels). But don’t let that mislead you: it would have been a contender in any year. It joins and deserves its place among the many other Booker winning novels set in India, such as Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, Paul Scott’s Staying On, Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, and of course the Booker of Bookers, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
PS I am not a massive fan of trigger warnings, but there is a scene of child sex abuse in this novel that you probably ought to be aware of. It’s written from the child’s perspective (frightened and confused) and while admittedly it adds to the disturbing atmosphere of the novel in the run up to the tragedy, I am not convinced it was needed.
The Reading Bug 