The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness

Arundhati Roy Hamish Hamilton €23.44 It is 20 years since Roy won the Booker Prize with The God Of Small Things. She will not be winning any prizes with this bloated encore. There are some interesting things in it: two babies born with male and female genitals; their struggles for acceptance; strangers finding love; Kashmiri politics; hunger strikes; religion; a dung beetle that is a metaphor for something or other. But the narrative sprawls badly and there is a surfeit of arch pseudo-philosophical ramblings. A mess.