Book Review: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I did not care for this one bit. I found it cloying, infantilising, and far too circuitous.

It starts off as a bit of an overwritten melodrama, where every phrase is a delicious flower waiting to bloom, but ends up being a over-sugared mess with a rotten heart. Parts are just exhausting to read, with no time to catch your breath between scenes. That can work in some books when spaced out - here I just found it annoying.

My main problem with it, though, is that it feels like it is entirely exposition. Because of the (unnecessarily) jumbled order of the story, every paragraph feels like it is introducing us to something or someone. Rather than progress the plot, I felt like I was being drip-fed morsels for what was coming up. In the end, the story just isn't interesting enough to support that.

Parts of the writing are gorgeous, but they're in service of so little that it seems like an unfair sleight of hand; you're too busy admiring the prose to realise how dull and uneventful everything is. The repetition hammers away like a vocal tic - wearing out its welcome by the tenth occurrence. The mannered spelling, punctuation, and extemporising is similarly grating after a while.

I don't mind characters being unsympathetic - but every single one is painted as a monster or a simpleton. It's hard to keep reading when nearly all the main characters are so relentlessly unlikeable. I know I'm not a big fan of sad or upsetting books, but there was so little joy or happiness in this one that I felt grimy reading it. Afterwards I was left wondering what the point of it was. I do not doubt that the depictions of casteism were well done but, again, to what end?

I read this for a book club and wondered what my fellow readers made of it. All of us found it a challenging read, with most raising similar criticisms to mine. We all found the prose to be beautiful but the plot lacking. Only one of use gave it a positive review - but we all agreed it was a fascinating book to discuss.

Perhaps we were all just philistines? Yet each of us came up with a compelling reason why we found it so unpalatable. There truly was something for everyone to complain about.