The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Estha and Rahel, seven-year-old twins, are growing up amidst vats of banana jam, mountains of peppercorns and scenes of political turbulence in Kerala. When their beautiful young cousin Sophie arrives, their world is shaken irrevocably. An illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional expose things that lurk unsaid in a country drifting dangerously towards unrest.

The God of Small Things is very imaginatively written. It is full of imagery which combines the senses in ways that I had never considered – adding colours to feelings, or flavours to objects.

From the seven-year-old twins’ perspective, the world is a complicated place where they struggle to make sense of the nuances of authority and human relationships, often losing sight of the bigger picture. As seven-year-olds do, they take it upon themselves to worry about things on behalf of adults who would not think the same things are worth worrying about. The twins’ perspective is also a reminder of the longer-lasting and more damaging aspects of learning to navigate the world and how offhand remarks from an adult can stay with us and shape us well into adulthood.

The more positive side of the twins’ outlook is that it is filled with the kinds of imaginative quirks that wear off as adulthood approaches. The way they categorise events and people in their lives captures the childlike way of dealing with one thing at a time without putting it into any context: they see the world as being constructed of lots of Small Things.

Forbidden love is a key theme of this book, often in the form of love between different Indian castes and interracial relationships. The elder family members pressure the younger members into marrying but are dissatisfied with who they choose. Many of the relationships in the book are unsuccessful or unrequited; those that are ‘successful’ in a traditional sense are in fact unhappy, and those that are based only on love are in fact forbidden.

As for the plot, we learn of Sophie’s tragedy early on in the book but how it came about becomes apparent only gradually. The narrative flits between past and present, diving into the characters’ past experiences and backstories, so that we eventually have the full context to the climax of the story, although it is delivered piecemeal. I have read mixed reviews of this technique – some of the reviewers found the book confusing because the timeline jumped about too much but I found it struck the perfect balance of needing us to do some thinking to work out how the story all fits together but not being so complicated that it becomes distracting to puzzle out the timeline.

The unresolved or unfinished nature of the stories and relationships in The God of Small Things are what makes it relatable and realistic. The story is filled with small tragedies – and some big ones – evolving throughout life to portray a sense of growth and growing up in a complex world.