Arundhati Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things, first published in mid-1997, has become a worldwide hit. It is one of the bestselling literary novels, possibly the bestselling literary novel of recent decades-worldwide. Three million copies had been sold by September 1998; 1m alone in Britain and the Commonwealth (mainly India). It was initially published simultaneously in 16 different languages. You can read it in Spanish, Turkish, Chinese Simplified Characters and Chinese Complex Characters, Catalan, Czech or German -you name it. Roy has been on the bestseller lists in 34 separate "territories." There are currently piles of her books, my spies tell me, in every bookshop in Jerusalem. The Portuguese translation (top bestseller in Portugal) has just been issued in Brazil. The Hungarian translation has also just appeared. Japan, Macedonia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Finland, Iceland: our Lady of Kerala's Day of Pentecost is fully come. She speaks in many tongues.
But how has this phenomenal publishing success come about when The God of Small Things is-well-so bad? Even reviewers who warmed to it-and many did-could not fudge the awkwardness of the structure; the jumbled miscellany of narrative modes employed (coarse satire, high poetic, Mills & Boon-ish romance, child's-eye view, now first-person subjective narration, now omniscience); the truly terrible prose-full of twee kiddy-speak ("per NUN sea ayshun"); the coy pathetic fallacies (in which doggies and earthworms are endowed with a rich emotional life); the overdone metaphors; the endless piss-poor similes ("Her eyes spread like butter behind her thick glasses"); the emptily posturing adjectives and adverbs ("her eyes were redly dead"); the tiring neologistic compounds; the endless lists and the repetitive tub-thumper's phrasing ("It was a little cold. A little wet. A little quiet. The Air"). And, oh dear me, that relentless staccato rhythm. One Word Sentences. One Word Paragraphs. Capitalised. Nouns. For Significance. Unearned. Breathy. Gushy. Or, as Roy has it at one climaxing moment between her two caste-transgressing lovers, the naughty wife Ammun and the untouchable carpenter Velutha: Frantic. Frenzied. Further. Above all, Further. Perhaps it all reads better in Finnish.
Bestsellers are never simply vacuous. Nothing, as King Lear rightly thought, will come of nothing, even in the modern world of skilled publishers' hype. Jeffrey Archer's novels, for example, are terrible in many ways, but they are readable; you keep turning the page. They would not sell if there were not something there for the reader. The God of Small Things is not, as Harry Ritchie, former literary editor of the Sunday Times, has put it with abundant provocation, simply silly. The merely silly does not sell, however hard it is pushed. Even in publishing there are no bricks without some straw. The God of Small Things has got plenty of straw. Straw has been stuffed in a-plenty. Calculatedly. Assiduously. Withacannyeyeonthemainchancedly, as Roy might put it.
Some of her many interviews and press releases give the impression of a poor little architectural student from the backwoods-the slums even-of new Delhi, who may have pulled off a few hot-shot film scripts but who is really a sort of Grand-daughter Moses of the novel. She is a natural-na?ve, spontaneous, more or less unread in the ways of modern and current fiction (except for To Kill A Mocking Bird, which was on her school syllabus). "I don't know the rules of literature," she says. "When I write, I never rewrite a sentence because for me my thought and my writing are one thing. It's like breathing, I don't rebreathe a breath." (So much for the much bruited four years at the word processor.) But this is so much blague. The God of Small Things is a deftly garnered bag of fictional tricks, a compound of things which have worked for other writers, have made names and sold novels, and which seem blatantly calculated to press the right buttons again with readers.
It is usual for early novels to pay well-known works of fiction the compliment of pastiche, to get on by aping their predecessors. But Arundhati Roy's wardrobe of borrowed clothing is, by any standards, bulging. Her cross-caste lovers are indeed an homage to Harper Lee's inter-racial erotics in To Kill A Mocking Bird. Her central Anglophile (and Anglo-Indian) family group is an attempt to cash in on Paul Scott's act: Staying On, so to speak, stays on. Her fictional family's pickle factory and pickling activities (realism and allegory all at once) can only be seen as a touch for the Salman Rushdie effect-India marketed once more as magic realism of the immensely Touchable Rushdie sort. Her play with the lingo of the communist printer Pillai and his awful Walter Scott-reciting daughter is straight out of the pages of the lovely RK Narayan. The novel's extensive trade in moth collecting is a dab at bringing in the Woolf reader and the Nabokov fan. There is plenty of fashionable post-colonialism in the bedtime induction into Kipling of the main twinned characters, Rahel and Estha; above all, in the novel's long drawn out climax. The verbal compounding work is a tribute to Joyce; the constant verbal threesomes -nouns, adjectives, phrases-is hand-me-down Martin Amis. And for good measure, there is incest, child abuse (what the orangelemondrinkseller did to Estha during a showing of The Sound of Music) and body grotesquerie (tribute to the India of Rohinton Mistry and his ilk). How much more au courant can you get? Here, quite by design-the Hollywoodian, or in this case Bollywoodian, construct that gives us endless repeats of successful movie plots-is something for everyone: from Booker judges to students in post-colonialism seminars (I have already sat through a paper at an international literary conference on Roy and Conrad), to readers of low-brow fiction who are stirred by lush sex in exotic locations (reviews in the Daily Mail, Harpers & Queen and the Sunday Express were particularly ecstatic).
So the literary agent David Godwin was right to spot a highly saleable mix. He was not behind in selling it to Philip Gwyn Jones, then the new editorial director at Flamingo. At which point the redoubtable HarperCollins machine was swung into action a whole year before publication. The big "six-figure" advance must at all costs be recouped: big advances really do focus a publisher's mind. The Bookseller was soon reporting that "the debate (at HarperCollins) rages only as to whether it is the novel of the year, the novel of the 1990s or just the greatest modern novel-there is no debate about its status as a modern masterpiece."
Much publicity bread was cast on the waters-on the oceans even. Big translation deals were hinted at. Advance copies, lavish posters, book-bins were pressed on every willing bookseller and, naturally, photo-opportunities. There was carefully planted gossip in the gossip columns; glossy pieces galore in the glossies. (It helped that Roy is also lovely and sexy and terrifically photogenic.) Then came the global promotional tour. "She turned to writing fiction in an attempt to find quiet and anonymity in her life," declared the Mail on Sunday with some wit, "and is currently on an international promotional tour." The hype was not new in kind; it just seemed more intense than normal. This "eagerly awaited first novel," said Blake Morrison in the Independent on Sunday. Not half. Karen Duffy of HarperCollins was awarded the 1998 Hardback Fiction prize of the Publishers Publicity Circle for her efforts with The God of Small Things.
And then came the Booker. Winning the Booker, as Roy did in 1997, was the publicity coup which even the hard-striving marketing people at HarperCollins could only have dreamed of. The Booker is the best known of our fiction prizes for good reason: its publicity regime is extraordinarily efficient. Martyn Goff and Book Trust, who administer the prize for Booker plc with the help of the PR firm Colman Getty, manage to keep the Booker in the sights of the book world and the reading public for just about the whole year round. Gossip about the judges, enticing leaks of the longlist, carefully placed stories about judicial argy-bargy, the public agonies of losers, the hubris of the bookies-all these whet and feed a strong public appetite. Being short-listed for the Booker makes your sales soar. There are people who buy the whole shortlist-just like that. Winning can take your sales through the roof, change your life, bring film offers, make your name. The Booker gets you into the canon of books not only read but studied.
For The God of Small Things, the Booker meant publicity heaped upon publicity. Sales since the winning day have gone wild. It is now the best-selling Booker hardback ever. (It remains to be seen how the movie that it seems written to become will get on-The English Patient is, so far, the biggest-selling Booker prize movie adaptation.)
Winning the Booker, of course, has a good deal of the lottery about it; The God of Small Things was lucky, I think, to have won. It was lucky, perhaps, that one of the 1997 judges happened to be Jason Cowley, who had earlier raved about Roy in his review in The Times. This was one of several reviews plumping for praise in spite of perceiving grounds for the opposite ("Despite lapses into portentousness and some overwriting," and despite working "under the shadow of Salman Rushdie.") Cowley's review revealed him to have been dazzled by all the items of hype, the mythographic stories about "impecunious screenwriter and occasional aerobics teacher," and the "more than ?1m advance"-a common confusion knocking about between dollars and sterling. Perhaps he was the judge who really pushed for Roy. It only takes one. At any rate, my guess is that Roy's was the classic example of committee-process winner, the novelist who just scrapes on to the Booker longlist, then flukes it as the last place on the shortlist, and then, on the day, comes home not by lengths, but as the only book the judges-each of whom would prefer other novels, but different others-can reach any agreement on. Everybody's second or even third choice. And the winner takes all.
Mere sales do not mean readers reading all through to the end of a novel, nor liking even what they read, should they manage that. For every reader I have met who is keen on Roy, there is another I have encountered who has been unable to struggle through to the end. Audience response of this sort is never factored into the carefully gathered sales figures, the marketeer's graphs or the analyses in the trade papers. It should be. Such knowledge might be deeply unsettling all round. The Most Unread Purchased Book of the Year. Even the prize-winning spin doctors at HarperCollins would have difficulty making that look good for business.
