18 Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy 5/5
This memoir moves along at a breathless pace and I found it quite extraordinary. It’s really more a story of Roy’s own life than of her mother’s (as perhaps the title itself suggests), but her mother is a larger-than-life figure whom Roy portrays with an admirable mix of honesty and sympathy. Roy grows up with cultural capital, but spends years of her life very poor, and then later in life she wins the Booker and becomes a wealthy woman virtually overnight. Again, she writes about this transformation in a refreshingly frank way. Sometimes she can perhaps be a bit self-aggrandising (as when she describes herself as seeing the world through the eyes of her character Anjum, indeed becoming Anjum, when she is writing her second novel), but her fervently held political beliefs and her determination to stand up for the underdog impressed me greatly. I learnt a lot about modern Indian politics from reading this book (eg Narendra Modi’s right-wing BJP party). It’s clear that for Roy, politics come first and literature second (although one can’t really separate the two). I think she’s a bit of a mad genius. Incidentally, I loved The God of Small Things and this book made me want to reread it. Her second novel, though, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I found almost unreadable, and I’m not sure I have the stamina to give it another try. However, it’s fascinating to hear her describe it. I was also intrigued by the memoir’s depiction of how multilingual India is: Roy operates in a variety of different languages, with English being just one of her mother tongues, and she works with people who speak many other languages as well.
19 The Broken Afternoon, Simon Mason 4/5
The second mystery in the Wilkins series. Very well-written, and perhaps darker than the first Wilkins book. More attention is paid in this novel to fleshing out the character of DI Ray Wilkins, the more privileged of the two Wilkins detectives, whereas the first novel in the series focused more on Ryan. There are a few mad implausibilities and coincidences, but I am definitely a fan of this series.
20 The Correspondent, Virginia Evans 4/5
Women’s Prize longlist. This epistolary novel is very cleverly and insightfully done. Sybil, who is in her 70s, writes to people of many different ages and backgrounds (including real-life authors she admires, like Joan Didion and Ann Patchett), and the way she portrays herself to each of her correspondents is different. She is also quite selective in terms of which bits of information she chooses to share with her various addressees. As a result, she emerges as a convincingly complex character, and little by little we discover more pieces in the narrative of her life. This novel was almost a bold for me because of its originality, but I thought the ending tied up all the narrative strands too neatly, so that every single conflict had to be resolved in Hollywood-movie fashion. In fact, apparently the movie rights have already been sold, and Jane Fonda will produce and star in the film. @AliasGrape I remember that your review said something very similar about the ending – good point about the novel’s undermining of its own Lonesome Dove theme, about the courage it takes to portray suffering in narrative.