BOOK OF THE DAY
REVIEW
Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy review – brave and absorbing
In this remarkable memoir, the Booker-winning novelist looks back on her bittersweet relationship with her mercurial mother
Twelve minutes into an interview with Allen Ginsberg for the BBC’s Face to Face, Jeremy Isaacs asks him about the extraordinary long poem he wrote about his mother: “In Kaddish, you mourn your mother. What was the effect on you of living with a mother who was mad?” Ginsberg’s answer, mildly inflected by a laugh, is: “It gave me a great sort of … tolerance for eccentric behaviour.”
This attempt to understand the compulsion to love what seems hostile transforms Roy’s writing, lending her prose, especially in the first 130 or so pages, an unprecedented freedom. An astringent conscience-keeper in the political sphere, she finds herself, with her mother as the subject, on terrain that tests her in quite a different way. We discover, in these sections, an ability to transition between contraries, a fluency that is less “empathy” than something unpredictable and alchemical. Note, for example, the paradoxically liberating role the word “fortunately” plays in this sentence about her mother, brother, and herself: “He remembered being loved. Fortunately, I didn’t.” Or the defiantly jubilant assertion, “I loved killing them”, about the lice the family help would comb out of her hair.
The world described in the first part of the book provides much of the material for The God of Small Things. But these pages aren’t significant for giving us access to Roy’s inspiration, or as a preamble to her life as a bestselling writer who would go on to become an oppositional political voice. Even if she were none of these things or had never written her novel, they would be utterly absorbing. They have a wonderful, self-assured self-sufficiency.
In the late 1970s, Roy escaped her mother, arriving in Delhi and enrolling in the School of Planning and Architecture there. At this point the memoir also bears witness to a world-historical shift: the receding of a kind of modernity and politics which had given rise to experimental lives and ways of thinking. Both Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, despite the great gulf between their backgrounds and world views, embodied the open-endedness made possible by such experimentation. So did Mary Roy and her brother George Isaac in their various projects and vicissitudes. I’d also situate Micky Roy in this context: one of the funniest, most moving sections in this book has to do with Arundhati’s reunion with her father in a hotel in Delhi: “He was lying on his stomach with his knees bent, his feet waving at the ceiling.”
This attempt to understand the compulsion to love what seems hostile transforms Roy’s writing, lending her prose, especially in the first 130 or so pages, an unprecedented freedom. An astringent conscience-keeper in the political sphere, she finds herself, with her mother as the subject, on terrain that tests her in quite a different way. We discover, in these sections, an ability to transition between contraries, a fluency that is less “empathy” than something unpredictable and alchemical. Note, for example, the paradoxically liberating role the word “fortunately” plays in this sentence about her mother, brother, and herself: “He remembered being loved. Fortunately, I didn’t.” Or the defiantly jubilant assertion, “I loved killing them”, about the lice the family help would comb out of her hair.
The world described in the first part of the book provides much of the material for The God of Small Things. But these pages aren’t significant for giving us access to Roy’s inspiration, or as a preamble to her life as a bestselling writer who would go on to become an oppositional political voice. Even if she were none of these things or had never written her novel, they would be utterly absorbing. They have a wonderful, self-assured self-sufficiency.
In the late 1970s, Roy escaped her mother, arriving in Delhi and enrolling in the School of Planning and Architecture there. At this point the memoir also bears witness to a world-historical shift: the receding of a kind of modernity and politics which had given rise to experimental lives and ways of thinking. Both Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, despite the great gulf between their backgrounds and world views, embodied the open-endedness made possible by such experimentation. So did Mary Roy and her brother George Isaac in their various projects and vicissitudes. I’d also situate Micky Roy in this context: one of the funniest, most moving sections in this book has to do with Arundhati’s reunion with her father in a hotel in Delhi: “He was lying on his stomach with his knees bent, his feet waving at the ceiling.”
This shift ultimately created the world we inhabit today. Even before the precipitous slide towards the far right now evident almost everywhere, there was the feverish globalisation that engendered a liberal elite just as bizarre as any of its political opponents. These changes are – explicitly and implicitly – the subject of the second half of the book. They are woven into Roy’s continual, courageous confrontations with the nation-state, including her criticism of its nuclear policies and opposition to Sardar Sarovar dam. Roy loves India deeply, but the nation-state isn’t India, and it doesn’t love her back. The conflict is comparable to, albeit profoundly different from, her relationship with Mary Roy.
Globalisation is also woven into Roy’s overnight success: it becomes a kind of co-author of her first novel. That success was akin to an inheritance left to a writer in the 18th century by an obscure uncle: something Roy benefits from but whose meaning she must also grapple with. In the midst of this, Mary Roy re-enters her daughter’s life, the mother delighted by Arundhati’s celebrity, but also puncturing it occasionally with Dadaist zeal. Throughout the book, but with especial force in the second half, Mrs Roy’s resistance and recalcitrance are an invigorating antidote to whatever our new world preaches is most rewarding about life.
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