[Craig is a South African-born English journalist. In the following review, she contends that, while The God of Small Things suffers from Roy's somewhat overwrought style, the book demonstrates the author's talent and promise.]

This year's India novel is … but stop. Where did that sneering phrase creep in? We do not speak of this year's Ireland novel, or Africa novel, or any other former British colony on which our culture was imposed.

The Indian novelist is confronted with a paradox. Our feelings about India are so complex that a novel is rarely judged on its own merits rather than on a mixture of guilt, anger, defiance and sneaking envy. Those such as Rushdie, who stress the exotic, profit by it; Rohinton Mistry, on the other hand, is accused of writing flat prose—presumably because critics, when confronted with a thick book about poor people, simply cannot cope with too much reality.

Arundhati Roy, whose first novel (The God of Small Things) has excited much interest, is getting both ends of it, as an Indian and as a woman. With her advance of £500,000, her photogenic face and big coverage in this month's Vogue and New Yorker, the British critical response has been predictably hostile. So, is she any good?

Her novel, like most such debuts, is a mixture of outstanding promise and wonky style. Roy badly needs a good editor to sieve the gold from the chaff, because her response to her culture is both overwhelmed and overwhelming. The melding of cultures produces a periodic sub-Joycean melt-down of language; the English reader who has rejoiced in the absurdities and felicities of Indian English will find this almost as irritating as the author's fondness for capitalised clichés, such as "Things Can Change in a Day". Yet she has wit, intelligence and a sensuous love of words.

The plot, which is difficult to disentangle because the novel uses fractured time, concerns a pair of twins, Estha and Rahel, and their family. They spend their childhood in Cochin, Kerala, and live with their beautiful mother, Ammu, and their blind grandmother, Mammachi. The latter has started the Paradise Pickle Factory and, under the influence of the twins' uncle Chacko, promoted a Harijan (Untouchable) within it, much to the horror of the other workers.

At first the novel seems to be about the twins, their innocent precocity and comic delight in the English language. Yet we know that something terrible will happen. Quite soon the twins (who, we are told, share one soul) will be separated and Estha rendered mute. The adult Rahel has a husband who cannot understand the expression in her eyes: "He put it between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough."

Only the God of Small Things can help you survive, by becoming resilient and truly indifferent.

The twins' mother and their Harijan friend, Velutha, fall in love. Their first, cataclysmic love-making is not described until the end of the novel, after we have been told of the suffering it causes—how Velutha has been beaten to death and falsely accused of kidnap and murder, how the twins' cousin has drowned, how the communists of Cochin have utterly failed in their promise, and innocent lives been ruined.

Despite Roy's defects of style, this is a sumptuous portrait of a family, a community and a tragic love affair. Fractured time has been employed by writers as diverse as Pinter, Spark and Barbara Vine. When successfully handled, it is both affecting and aesthetically satisfying to a high degree. The God of Small Things is not just this year's India novel. Nor is it, as its publishers unwisely proclaim, a masterpiece. It is, however, written by someone who shows every promise of being capable of producing such a thing in the future.