Arundhati Roy’s ambitious comeback falls short
Cutesy, sentimental, poorly structured, unconvincing and desperately eager to please
Fiction: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, By Arundhati Roy, Hamish Hamilton, €17.25
Arundhati Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things, is by now more or less firmly established as a contemporary classic. It is not, for all that, a very good book: a mishmash of magic-realist clichés trotted out in off-puttingly ripe prose.
In the two decades since it appeared, Roy has published no fiction. Instead, she has devoted herself to human ...
