the ministry of utmost happiness book review

It did have a plot, sort of.Īt best, The God of Small Things, with its rhetoric and strained lyricism, arrives at a level of designer exotic. Added to this is their extended family, a clan of caricatured Anglophiles straight out of central casting. It centres on the accidental death by drowning of a half-English little girl and how it affects the subsequent lives of her cousins, fraternal twins who are reunited in their 30s. Yet it is far less ponderous than her overrated debut, The God of Small Things, which unexpectedly won her the Booker Prize in 1997 ahead of Jim Crace's outstanding biblical epic Quarantine, not to mention Tim Parks's Europa and Bernard MacLaverty's limpid Grace Notes.įor fear this review reads as a grudge match, it seems only fair to mention that months before its Booker success, which duly made it an international bestseller, The God of Small Things struck me as a sentimental popular romance, suspended between the grotesque and crypto-magic realism. Roy is not witty although the prose is slangy and often achieves a situation comedy-like banter. That is not to suggest the book is funny or even amusing it is not. But then everything is obvious in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.ĭespite the violence and the brutality, religious tensions and emphasis on varying darkness of skin colour, the underlying tone is hopeful, which should be acknowledged as the narrative is so ramshackle and randomly conceived, a reader could easily lose interest – and probably will.Ībout the most interesting aspect is Roy's determined cheerfulness. God's carotid burst open on the new border between India and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred.' The graveyard, as is obvious, is a metaphor for India. True to her campaigning instincts, Roy the activist is soon referring to the tragic history of her country. It becomes apparent that Roy is gamely striving for a Rushdie-like concoction while failing to replicate his trademark bombastic flourish. Within pages of this messy and superficial but good-natured narrative, a sensation of deja vu takes over. Her scholarly father merely lamented fate’s cruelty, seeking comfort from poetry. She had begun life as Aftab, a much wanted son her loving mother understood her dilemma.

At the age of 46, she goes to live in the graveyard “like a tree”. Towering drama queen Anjum moved there after years of living in the Khwabgah with the other Hijras, exotic transgender creatures born to give sexual pleasure to others, while receiving none in return. It is a busy base camp and home to Anjum, one of the central characters.

How to begin? Well, the action, such as it is, of Arundhati Roy’s chaotic second novel largely takes place in a graveyard.

The ministry of utmost happiness book review