Tring Book Club: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I have to admit I struggled with this choice for my book club. I would have given up half way through but for some reviews which promised a better ending. I found it hard to get interested in the back stories of so many characters who did not (at the time) seem important to the story. I guess if I had to read it again I would have more appreciated those for the great aunt Baby Cochamma. Velutha and his father and the twins grand parents, Pappachi and Mammachi. But at the time I felt they were just interminable interruptions to the story.

At the centre of the book are those twins, Estha and Rahel. They are eight or nine years old for most of the time, but the rare occasions they are mentioned, once about the twins 23 years later, felt like awful teasers as we never know about their lives during these times. There are a couple of pages about half way about Rahle that are confusing to say the least. These jumps around in time feature heavily and are too oblique to make a satisfying read. They just made me dizzy. Then Page 11, for instance is the biggest plot spoiler I have ever read in a novel, in addition to a few pages about Rahel and Estha in the future.

I would call the prose erratic. There are instances of greatness. The silence on a train "A quiet bubble floating on a sea of noise". When Estha shops, the vendors of the vegetables "grew to recognise him". He never bargained. "They never cheated him". Then going through a mother's suitcase "with all the delicacy of a dog digging up a flower bed". A police inspector ridicules the treatment of a lower caste character: "You people, first you spoil these people, carry them about on your head like trophies, then when they misbehave you come running to us for help".

However, I found a lot of the descriptions tedious and pretentious. "When they grew tired of waiting, the dinner smells climbed off the curtains and drifted through the Sea Queen windows to dance the night away on the dinner-smelling sea". If you like that, go for it.

But when Rahel and her uncle Chacko have to share a hotel room there are four amazing straightforward pages. And then we have the last third of the book. A much more linear story that gains momentum and that very early plot spoiler is realised in all it's distressing form. Goodness knows what book club will think.

A mixed response from book club as I might have expected. I have now been able to set up a group chat on Messenger to replace our normal meeting. Not quite the same, but hopefully we can now communicate on a regular basis instead of just once every five weeks.