Friday, November 16, 2018

Inimitable

Thoroughly enjoying Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, but finding it immensely disturbing. Couldn't quite pin down what made it so, then realised it's something to do with the blazing indignation of the text in terms of the social wrongs with which it deals (though 'deals' seems too mild a word for what Ms Roy is up to.)

Normally I'm highly inclined to distrust moral/political/social indignation - especially when I'm feeling it myself. It's rare that a writer convinces in this territory. The parallel that springs to my mind regarding the special quality of indignation involved in this novel is, oddly I suppose, with Dickens - the kind of generous, humanely ferocious indignation Orwell identified in the Inimitable. Roy seems to me to echo that, without imitation.

By the by, I think she'd make a very bad model for a younger writer to imitate. My mother would have called her a one-off. A quite astonishing, wonderful one.

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