The God of Small Things

"Of all the great modern Indian novels , of which there has been a flood, Arundhati Roy is the one I enjoyed most. It’s got that fabulous quality, in the literal sense. It has a craftsmanship to it, and one of the greatest endings to any novel. There are so few modern novels which end perfectly, with that perfect click into place, the lock clicking shut. But it has that, and it’s a very well-worked, well-written novel. I hope she repeats it at some point in the future. It has a great debt, although not in subject matter at all, to Toni Morrison’s Beloved : oppression, in this case not between black and white, but of the lower caste by the upper caste, the love affair between an upper-caste woman and an untouchable man. It ends in tragedy. But although you know what will happen for almost the entire book, she still manages to save up this extraordinary ending. Roy has a very tricksy writing style, which seemed very fresh at the time. Those who have read some of her writing after this may find it less so, and, on re-reading it, it didn’t have quite such an effect on me as it did the first time when I read it in 1997, but it is a great novel by any standard, and as a debut novel outstanding."