![]() ![]() The God of Small Things used standard fictional props to suck in the ‘global-liberal’ reader, before inserting uncomfortable slivers of doubt into his world-view. It spun a tale of individuals in a colourfully post-colonial setting, along well-established lines of Anglophone novel-writing, sometimes brushed with magic, behind which lurked the politics of its author. The God of Small Things, as a novel, hailed from the mainstream lineage in Anglophone writing-those many children of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens-though, in Roy’s case, thankfully midwifed by John Berger. The God of Small Things, whose radical reputation was far in excess of its structure and style. ![]() But it is more experimental a work than Roy’s excellent first novel, Not that this is a perfect novel, or that it even deserves all the hyperbolic accolades being showered on it in certain quarters. ![]() No amount of showing can save a bad writer, and even an excess of telling can result in an interesting novel by a good writer-as ![]() Had a writer less acclaimed than Arundhati Roy sent this novel as a manuscript to a major agent, it might have been returned with a note: ‘Show more, tell less.’ Of course, no agent writes notes like that to the Roys of the literary world, and of course the advice is rubbish. ![]()
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