It struck me again here that pages seemed to be going by without dialogue. I don't think there's anything wrong with that but the reason for it in Arundhati Roy's long-awaited second novel is that it is filled with characters all of who have to have their back story told as they appear. It is understandable that modern India needs to be comprehended as a teeming population of many varied histories and how else does one do it but present as many of them as it takes.
The war in Kashmir provides the context for many of the atrocities described in often captivating prose that is at odds with the horrors it brings with it. If there it is sectarianism that causes the inhumanity and horror, it is more generally an essay on the faults of capitalism, which would not be to say that similar things didn't happen under other prevailing economic systems, but,
On TV they said that that summer homeless people had taken to sleeping on the edges of roads with heavy traffic. They had discovered that diesel exhaust fumes from passing trucks and buses were an effective mosquito repellent
and the outbreak of dengue fever.
But, not having had time to re-acquaint myself with The God of Small Things, this book seems more ambitious but also, in line with Arundhati's writing and campaigning since, more polemical, less well-formed and possibly less successful. Expectations were so high, though, that it was always going to be up against it.
One of the more notably gorgeous passages comes in the relationship of Musa and Tilo,
-the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him.
I hadn't intended to make this a comparative study of Arundhati and Virginia but it brings to mind the 'arid scimitar' of the male contrasted with femimine intuition in To the Lighthouse and is one of any number of passages that convince us that Utmost Happiness would be a great book by most standards but we are reading it in the shadow of such impossible hopes (assuming that The God of Small Things is still the mmiracle we thought it was twenty years ago).
The ending presents some kind of resolution, some pages of closure but, given what we've been though, I'm not convinced. Having been unflinching in the catalogue of torture, murder, violence, prejudice, injustice and maladministration, impressive and undoubtedly 'true' as it all is - and few will idealize the sub-continent as a soulful, spiritual retreat having considered its downside- one isn't ready to accept any sort of happy ending gloss. It is magnificent but, perhaps wrongly, I prefer poem to polemic by now and though few admire an anti-capitalist foot soldier more than me, I did spend too much of the 1970's reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his reportage from Soviet Russia had themes in common with Arundhati's.
