In danger of toppling under its own weight
THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99)
WHEN, in 1997, Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her debut novel, she collected the award and promptly abjured the whole business of writing fiction for two decades. The iridescent success of The God of Small Things trailed her anyway, even when she cut her hair and headed into the jungle to live with Maoist rebels.
After all kinds of activism and numerous works of non-fiction, here is a second novel. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness builds stories within stories with its palimpsestic worlds, its glut of characters, and Roy’s 20 years of pentup imagination bears down heavily.
The novel begins with child hermaphrodite, Anjum, a brilliant creation who first finds allegiance with Delhi’s gender-fluid “hijras” and then adopts an abandoned baby and builds an eccentric community in a graveyard that has, in its zest and humour, an Almodóvar-style quality to it.
Just as this story is unfolding the book swerves to a second, with another female protagonist and another abandoned baby. This one is about love in a time of war between
Tilottama (Tilo), a laconic, touslehaired, free spirit, and the freedomfighter Musa and his old schoolfriends, Naga and Biplap. The factions in Kashmir are keenly drawn alongside state brutality but the men fall into simplified moral categories
Tilo, meanwhile, has more than a touch of Ammu, the central character in The God of Small Things. She too has a complicated relationship with motherhood and feels a deep, unconventional love for the hunted Musa that is not far removed from the forbidden feelings Ammu has for an Untouchable called Velutha.
More generally, there are features in this book that borrow from the last, most gratingly its verbal games, whimsical tone and stylistic repeats. Roy has said that she never wants to “walk past” a character without getting to know them, and so there is a democracy of voice, right down to the most minor upturned beetle.
These voices begin to feel cacophonous, yet simultaneously lack in any real interiority so that they seem as if they have been pinned to the page in rich, carnivalesque language, like beautiful dead butterflies.
Anjum, when describing her inner multitudes at the beginning, refers to herself as “everything and nothing” and it is ironically this sense of the book’s infinite abundance that makes The Ministry of Utmost Happiness diffuse, unfocused, “everything and nothing” at once.