What is a whisper without sound shared between two people? It is a brief treaty of love, a common condition that saves one breath so that, on another day, they might speak it without an audience of nature present. Arundhati Roy’s debut novel, “The God of Small Things,” feels like the first hush actualized on the page, a brief but unsettling joining of conversation that is commonly interrupted by the slash of limbs on the breeze, the shutter of a film and the flutter of a moth placed on both objects.
This can all be accredited to Roy’s ability to stylistically write with the mind of a child. As the novel follows two children, she interweaves their inner commentary, their intrusive thoughts, and their sing-song rhymes that have been taught to them by their mother and supporting character Baby Kochamma, until mutilating them into wholly new texts.
“The God of Small Things” also uses time as a form of meter consequence. The first chapter, the longest in the book, chops scenes before they can be truly lived in. Scenery is described and names are recalled, but there is a clear distinction between the disabling incoherence of trauma that borders on manic retelling. Further into the reading, these thought-to-be incoherent metaphors are eventually brought to center stage, where they breathe, once again, onto the novel.
Following the presumed murder of a British child, “The God of Small Things” relies on its setting, the Ayemenem house, to show the progression of the mystery in less robust and mechanically divisive ways, as other literary works are subject to do; the decay of the cupboards when the reader is transported in time, the overgrowth of ivy on the housing’s side, and the portraits of the great-grandparents, each a spectator in and on the house that observe the consequences of who loves who, and how much.
This theory, a practice turned into itself, is repeated throughout. Like pebbles dropped into a pond of fountain water, briefly disturbing the forms that live on and in the water, the laws of love are brought into the main conflict of the story, explaining the early bits of argument and then eventually fleshing out into the final chapter that uses this thesis to evaluate the projection of our earlier judgements.
It is with this treaty that Arundhati Roy uses love as conflict. Every instance of discomfort in the novel stems from the chaos of loving someone too much or too little, as seems to be the case from the children’s perspective. “The God of Small Things” is a mockery of the limits that we set in the situations we know will bring hardships, such that the complications begin to make a tragedy, a comedy even, of an otherwise beautiful feeling—that of hearing a whisper on a page, a breath saved for a later date.
