Epic novel rich with startling detail
Two decades in the making, Arundhati Roy’s second work of fiction is every bit worth the wait, writes Siobhan Harvey.
The first novel in more than 20 years by Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy starts in a graveyard. Not, you might think, the most auspicious of places to begin in a book which, in many ways, might be seen as a comeback. Of course, Roy has written many books recently, but all are non-fiction. Several of them, such as The Algebra of Infinite Justice, are superb.
Say Roy’s name, however, and it’s the sole novel, The God of Small Things which most readily springs to mind.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is every bit as epic as its predecessor. It might start among gravestones but its progression is built around major events in Indian history and characters marginalised by society, religion, gender and circumstance.
The novel’s ambiguous heroine is Anjum, elderly resident of said cemetery but whose long life Roy crafts as one of constant change, periphery, exploitation, and dismissal. There is something real, symbolic and referential about Anjum. Even her name has associative qualities – a play on the Indian equivalent of Shakespeare’s Juliet.
Epic in name and in nature, Anjum is crafted beautifully by Roy from the miscellany of life. The detail and nuance evoked by the author is rich and often startling. Within a few pages, for instance, Anjum moves from primary school to her teens, during which she finds belonging amongst an exotic group of marginalised people who reside in the euphemistic House of Dreams.
The backstories of her parents and those she shacks up with are layered amazingly into such succinct sections, captured in just a paragraph or two. This is repeated through an epic cast, especially those who court ambiguous Anjum, such as lifelong companion, The Man Who Knew English and the contentious DD Gupta.
The issues raised and engaged with are no less lavish and ambitious. Gender is perhaps the most obvious, and although the friends Anjum turns into family belong to one of India’s most ancient and ostracised of classes, their struggle for identity is modishly contemporary.
This fusion of the ancient and modern which Anjum represents bodily is also explored by Roy against the backdrop of a complex and fractious religious tensions and political history.
Anjum’s experiences, for instance, place her at the heart of Independence and Partition, those most divisive of the country’s political experiences.
In this, the heroine acts as an emblem in many ways of her country’s discord and transformation, her conflicts surrounding self acting as a mirror for the struggles that both separated and constructed old and modern-day India.
Proverbial and prophetic, Roy’s latest reads like a blessed marriage between Jeffrey Eugenides’-Middlesex and Rohinton Mistry’s spectacular A Fine Balance. Twenty years in the making perhaps; but more than worth the wait.