But some characters are much less realised than Anjum they brush past us and hardly draw us into their world. Nobody is at peace, everyone is restless with unsaid memories and unattained dreams. The sense that many of the most important wars and riots are inside, not outside, the characters, is vital to the impact of this novel. It can’t.” Nobody is at peace, everyone is restless with unsaid memories and unrealised dreams As another hijra says to her, “The riot is inside us. Instead of overdone trauma, we get acutely angled insight into what it might be like for her, finding a community where she is accepted but also coming into the realisation that she will never be really at peace with herself. She is scornful when film-makers, NGOs and foreign correspondents try to feed off her tragedy: “Others have horrible stories, the kind you people want to write about,” she says. There is nothing overly dramatic about Anjum’s recognition that she is a woman, no terror involved in her passage from her family into the commune where she lives most of her life. Her opening depiction of the life of the trans woman, or hijra, Anjum, for instance, is intriguing. At times, Roy’s desire to capture all sorts of diverse stories works brilliantly. This fragmented effect is partly down to the vast cast of characters. But here, over the years, the summer heat has leached the colour from the cement and the winter cold has caused the surface to contract and shatter into a pattern of hairline cracks.” I wanted a floor with a deep, soft shine, like those graceful old houses down south. “I notice that my experiment with the red cement floor has failed. Perhaps this could even be the result of its long gestation, rather like the experience that one of the characters has of painting his floor, whose surface becomes more broken the longer it is left. Even apparently incidental details had weight, and the characters moved vividly through the densely imagined scenes.Īlthough this follow-up has been so long in the making, it feels less polished than Roy’s first novel. I don’t think I will ever forget the cloying taste of the lemonade in that cinema where dark things happened, or the desiring glances between the doomed lovers. That book also used a rather jagged style, but moulded it into a narrative with a fierce emotional pull.
The publication of this novel, 20 years after Roy’s Booker prize-winning debut The God of Small Things, comes with great expectations. But there are dangers inherent in the attempt to become everybody and everything, and her clashing subplots and whimsical digressions can become rather unwieldy.
By slowly becoming everything.” Clearly, Roy’s scattershot narrative is deliberate it reflects the fragmentation of the world around us. “How to tell a shattered story?” one of the characters reads in his lover’s notebook towards the end, in a statement that also appears on the cover. What links the baby and the woman is left behind, to be continued much later in the novel. After a couple of pages, the scene cuts off and we switch point of view again, this time to the woman’s ex-husband. The woman’s interior monologue descends further and further into the surreal, as alligators, lizards and a “neocon newt” crowd into the classroom.
“Evil Weevils always make the cut,” says some graffiti on the weevil’s classroom wall. But the woman is dreaming about a weevil teaching ethics and quoting a contemporary philosopher on why we should never rely on pity. The reader is eager to leave the owl’s point of view and move into the woman’s mind we’ve heard about her and this baby already, and we want to understand what is going to happen to them. This scene seemed to me to sum up the unique flavour of the novel: an owl is looking through a window inside the room, a woman is lying with a sleeping baby she has kidnapped. Indeed, from time to time the birds and the beetles become as important as the people in this narrative. Here is a trans woman from Delhi, here is a man from an untouchable background passing himself off as a Muslim, here is a government official retired from a post in Kabul, here is a resistance fighter in Kashmir, here is a woman in the Maoist rebellion in Bastar, here is a rebellious woman who kidnaps an abandoned baby, and more. A rundhati Roy’s second novel is not just one story, but many.
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