There something childish about Roy. She has a heightened capacity for wonder., seeing the world as child might. This account for the familiarizing quality of her prose, her metaphorical exactitude and striking similes: a moon - lit river falling from a swimmer's arms like "sleeves of silver" : the small of shit hovering over a village "like a hat". Yet overall this was not a good year for the British, or indeed the Commonwealth novel. A quick of the prize (set up in 1968 by Booker Plc, an international glomerate), is that is does not fully embrace the English - speaking world: American writers are cautiously excluded. which probably sensible.
"As single shelf of a good European library," wrote Macuauly in 1835,"is worth the whole native literature." The Indian writers of this century have enacted a thrilling revenge of Macaualy - Roy included. There is, though, a deep ignorance about Indian fiction in the West; we have only read those writers working in English. This was demonstrated in many when the New Yorker Magazine gathered what is lazily called " India's leading novelists" in one room in Landon for a monumental photograph. What was notable about the photograph, apart from the prominence given to Roy before she had published any fiction, was the exclusion of any writer not working in English. Salman Rushdie may argue that the "true Indian literature of the first post colonial half century has been in the language the British left behind", but without the help of expert translators and farsighted publishers we in the West will always struggle to refute this characteristically bombastic assertion.Before the Booker prize dinner at Guldhall in Landon I asked Roy, mistakenly described as a magical realist, about this aspect of work. She spoke with passion about her continuing dialogue with Rushdie, and of her disappointment at his disregard for Indian writers working in the vernacular language, she said:" When I was in America I went out a couple of TV shows with Rushdie. And he said (she borrowed the voice of an officious schoolmaster), "The trouble with Arundhati is that she insist that India is an ordinary place". Well, I ask, "Why, the hell not?" It is my ordinary life. The difference between me and Rushdie begins there.
"I don't want brownie points because I'm from India. My book doesn't trade on the currency of cultural specificity, even though the details are right. That is why, I think, it has been bought in so many countries, and why America come up to me and say, "I've got an aunt like Baby Kochamma" ( a malign character who schemes to destroy Ammu and twins)."
Structurally the book is interesting, too. The main action of the book take place one day the December 1969 and concerns the drowning of a little Anglo - Indian girl, Sophie Mol, on holiday from England. Sophie spends the fortnight of her stay in a rapture of discovery. Together with her young cousins, the twins Estha and Rahel, she explores the hot, lush waterways and meadows of Kerala. She encounters, too. Velutha, a despised Paravan, with whom the twins' mother has an intense, doomed yet ultimately life - enhancing affair
Though the ending is flagged as early as page four, Roy employs a circuitous narrative so that events emerge elliptically and out of chronological sequence, she cannily uses cinematic techniques - time shifts, endless fast forwards and reversals, rapid editing - simultaneously to accelerate and delay the coming disaster. An atmosphere of foreboding, sometimes lapsing into portentousness, hangs over the narrative.
Yet Roy's book has many enemies. The critic Peter Kemp, irritated by her inclusion on the Booker Prize shortlist, continually bemoans what he calls her overwriting and "typographical tweeness" - archly capitalised phrases, coy misspellings, a liberal sprinkling of italics. Rushdie, though praising her verve and ambition, is disappointed by her refusal to describe India as exotic. Carmen Callil , co-founder of the feminist publishing house Virago and a Booker judge in 1996, appeared on British television after the Booker Prize dinner to denounce "The god of small things" as vulgar and execrable", which in itself was shamingly vulger.
"The god of small things" fulfills the highest demand of the art of fiction: to see the world, not conventionally or habitually, but as if for the first time. Roy's achievement, and it is considerable, is never to forgot about the small things in life: the insects and flowers, wind and water, the outcast and the despised. She deserved to win
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Jason Cowley is a literary journalist and critic. He write for the 'The Times', London, and was one of the five 1997 Booker Prize Judges.
* October 27. 1997 'INDIA TODAY'
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