Skip to main content

Review 12: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
I loved The God Of Small Things like it were my own exceptionally eloquent child, and I raced through it. So I thought, I’ll read Arundhati Roy’s follow-up, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness - it’s thick, but I’ll get through it in no time. WRONG. I tracked through it like a lazy slug, and I’m now a whole book behind schedule! This is bringing out the fear-sweats no end.

But it’s worth it. TMOUH is an extraordinarily expansive and devastating book about the relationship between Kashmir, India and Pakistan over recent decades.

It’s a pretty big undertaking, at nearly 450 pages, but the reason for its size is its attention to detail. Every character gets a full story, a well of experience that Roy uses to make each one fully three-dimensional. At first this is confusing, because you struggle to understand who the main characters are, and what the primary story is. But after a while you come to realise that, despite having some key plotlines, the aim of this book isn’t primarily to serve up the narratives of individual people – it’s a character-study of three nations, conducted through those people.

And the picture it paints isn’t pretty. There are some upsetting things in here – it’s most certainly not a read for the faint-hearted. And the worst parts are the ones that are true. For example, the brutal and shocking attacks on Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 following a train fire that killed 56 Hindus. Or just some of the seemingly endless, heartbreaking massacres that have been perpetrated in Jammu and Kashir. Roy doesn’t spare the reader details, and the awful authenticity makes you flinch. She even charts the complicity of current Prime Minister Modi in many of these atrocities (of which I was totally igorant) – albeit disguising his identity so thinly that I did wonder why she took the effort to do so at all.

While the troubles have obviously been exacerbated, and to great extent caused, by the British carving up of India and Pakistan, actually this comes into the story very little. Western involvement is mostly shown as tedious naivety, with white activists and tourists serving really only to patronise and misunderstand the local situation. This is a book mostly focused on the present, rather than the past.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t give much hope for the future either. This isn’t an uplifting read. You feel a definite sense of despair in humanity, for its violence and inability to heal after conflicts, and its focus on power over prosperity. But then, a book about such divided and sad situations doesn’t owe its reader uplift – just authenticity. And you come away feeling you’ve been delivered that in spades.

--

This is my twelfth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 19: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I imagine a lot of unimaginative reviews of this book say something like, Eleanor Oliphant is not Completely Fine, contrary to the title! and then they laugh at their own tiny joke for four hours. You won’t find that here, even though it is both true and apposite. Instead you’ll see me saying: this is a really great book. Even forgetting the inspired name of the protagonist, which never stops sounding like the name of an elegant elephant, it’s really good. Eleanor Oliphant lives alone and has forged an existence for herself of work, trips to the local Tesco Metro, and gentle, vodka-infused oblivion on the weekends. She doesn’t deal well with people. In fact, Oliphant displays an almost total lack of empathy. At first, you suspect that she may be autistic, since she shows all the signs: difficulty relating to others, low tolerance for leaving her routines, having to learn the outward signs of emotions by rote and experience, rather than innately understanding the differe...
2 comments
Read more

Review 7: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure . Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down. Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 1: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. How could you not love a book that begins like that? Early on in Stasiland , Anna Funder discusses the ‘puzzle women of Nuremberg’. This is a group of underfunded people (both men and women, oddly) who spend their days piecing together the scraps of documents the Stasi hurriedly shredded at the end of their regime. It feels like an apt analogy for Funder’s book itself – she carefully and brilliantly pieces together a view of what it was like to live in East Germany, and the effect it’s had on its citizens decades after the Berlin Wall was wrenched down, from snapshot interviews, research and her own experiences… despite the fact that most people she encounters would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. I came to this book knowing that East Germany was run as a Communist surveillance state, but little else. That was no problem. ...
1 comment
Read more