Too much of everything

Arundhati Roy has published only one previous novel, but that one, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize. That was 20 years ago. Early success did not, however, block Roy into neurotic silence: instead, it offered her a platform for verbally intemperate political activism. She is an impassioned campaigner against globalisation, industrialisation and all forms of the arch-enemy capitalism, and a critic of US foreign policy, Israel and the government of Sri Lanka. Her Booker prize money was donated to the campaign against the Narmada Dam project. To Indian critics who condemn her hyperbole as ‘hysterical’ she retorted: ‘I am hysterical, I’m screaming from the bloody roof tops.’

There is of course no reason why even a ‘hysterical’ political activist should not transmute into a fine novelist. The danger, however, is that the ‘small things’ will suffer from King Charles’s Head syndrome. ‘Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a newborn gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear — without thinking of the World Trade Centre and Afghanistan?’, as Roy asked in the Guardian. That is appallingly sentimental outrage.

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The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which has whimsical hyperbole in its very title, is flawed by similar self-indulgences. The Big Cause in this novel is the conflict in Kashmir, where shock and horror are the natural (though not the only) responses to the catalogue of historical atrocities. How is a novelist to embody this in fiction? Ominously, Roy rejects the straight-forward fictional ploys of narrative: ‘How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody.