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“As she leaned against the door in the darkness, [Ammu] felt her dream, her Afternoon-mare, move inside her like a rib of water rising from the ocean, gathering into a wave. The cheerful one-armed man with salty skin and a shoulder that ended abruptly like a cliff emerged from the shadows of the jagged beach and walked towards her.

Who was he?

Who could he have been?

The God of Loss.

The God of Small Things.

The God of Goosebumps and Sudden Smiles.

He could do only one thing at a time.

If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win…�
- Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Over the years, the lofty reputations of literature’s great novels can work against them. By the time you get to certain classics, there is almost no way they can live up to the hype that precedes them. But that is not the case with Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. The controversial Booker Prize winner has talons as sharp as the day it came off the printing presses in 1997. It is brutal and beautiful, challenging and discomforting, a book of precise insights, moral force, and emotional impact.

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The God of Small Things is difficult to summarize without overexplaining or spoiling its revelations. Suffice to say, Roy’s novel revolves around two tragic incidents that occur to two different children. Both of these moments are given to the reader up front, with the narrative itself only gradually circling back to them.

This technique works quite effectively. As Alfred Hitchcock used to explain, there is a fine distinction between surprise and suspense, and Roy understands it well. Though she tells you what’s coming down the road, she builds an enormous amount of tension is showing exactly how those distant points are reached. Roy executes so well that even her non-surprises are shocking.

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The most important thing to know in approaching The God of Small Things is its structure, which can be a bit of a challenge. The story takes place in two different timelines. The first � and main � timeline is in 1969, where the important stuff happens. The second is in 1993, where the characters are still reeling, nearly a quarter century later.

Additionally, the 1969 story-thread is nonlinear, with both forwards and backwards temporal leaps. While Roy is not deliberately trying to confuse things � all these fractured pieces eventually fall into place in meaningful ways � you have to pay careful attention to the transitions. It took me a minute, but once I understood what to look for � once I knew where the plot was headed � everything made a lot more sense. I say this because The God of Small Things has a bit of a learning curve imbedded within it.

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Our main characters are Rahel (a girl) and Esthappen (a boy), who are seven-year-old fraternal twins in 1969. They live in the village of Ayemenem in southwestern India, cared for by their single mother, Ammu, who has found herself cornered by life since she divorced her husband.

Ammu’s family owns a pickling factory, the control of which has been seized by Rahel and Esthappen’s Oxford-educated Uncle Chako. He was once married to an Englishwoman named Margaret, with whom he had a daughter, Sophie. The precipitating event in The God of Small Things is the visit of Margaret and Sophie to Ayemenem.

Roy’s handling of these people � and many more � is simply astounding. Everyone who walks across the stage gets their due. More than that, everyone is given dimension. There are some nasty folks in these pages, but all of that nastiness is earned. For example, Rahel and Esthappen have a hateful great-aunt known as Baby Kochamma. A thoroughgoing heel, she is also surprisingly sympathetic, given a fully-formed � and engrossing � backstory that explains how she came to be what she is, and how she came to do what she does. Even the archetypal police inspector, an officious jerk with just a passing role, is allowed a hint of shading as the cog of a machine.

To encompass this small universe, Roy employs an omniscient third-person perspective, in which she delves into the lives and innermost thoughts of just about everyone who appears on the page. By shifting perspectives at just the right time, though, she still manages to hold back several bombshells until late in the final act.

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The prose is something else. It is lyrical and lush and evocative. Roy uses the lost art of the simile to marvelous effect, and has the ability to describe things with such tactility that to read this book is to feel like you’ve seen a movie. From an airy church to a dingy airport, from a dusty road to a gaudy movie house, Roy creates incredibly detailed sets for her dramatic moments, making them an integral part of her scenes.

Roy pulls no punches in her writing, however, and this caused something of a backlash upon publication, and ever since. In particular, there is an unsparing depiction of a sexual assault in which she refuses to look away. The hideousness, the queasiness, are obviously the point � I did not sense any cheap, attention-seeking gratuity � and she lands the blows, but it’s also hard to read. Beyond that, there is a rawness and frankness to The God of Small Things that can be startling.

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The God of Small Things is bursting with motifs, and Roy sets them out boldly. Some derive from the particulars of India, especially caste segregation dividing Touchables from Untouchables. Others, such as misogyny, betrayal, manipulation, and thwarted love, are universal.

In a lesser novel, this sort of thematic underlining could be pedantic, even trite. But the power of Roy’s writing, the vividness of her thorny, conflicted characters, and the intensity of the book’s climactic incidents give meaning to otherwise well-worn sentiments. Ammu, Rahel, and Esthappen are hopelessly stuck in the slipstream of history and society, unable to control the larger things, and left to cling to those brief handholds of joy. Death is the cost of life, and the riddle that animates The God of Small Things is figuring out how to make that steep price worth paying.