It took Arundhati Roy 20 years to write her second novel. Not everyone will think the wait was worth it

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. By Arundhati Roy. Knopf; 464 pages; $28.95. Hamish Hamilton; £18.99.

THE attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001; the Gujarat riots of 2002 that left some 2,000 Muslims dead; the fall of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992; the imposition of emergency rule by Indira Gandhi in 1975; the partition of India. All these political earthquakes merit mention in just the first 50 pages of Arundhati Roy’s new novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”. Sometimes they propel the action forward. More often, as with the attacks on the twin towers, they are simply there, for no particular reason.

Then there is social justice: gender and identity are at the centre of this book—or at least in the first half. It starts with the story of Anjum, born with both male and female genitals, who becomes a member of South Asia’s community of hijras, the translation of which is shifting from “eunuch” to “transgender”. She is caught up in the Gujarat riots, which sets off a chain of events that lead to her leaving her community and her adopted daughter to set up home in a graveyard. Soon after, she all but disappears from the narrative.

In her place comes Tilottama, a wild-haired Kerala Christian who has studied architecture in New Delhi and is transparently modelled on Ms Roy herself. Tilottama is the object of affection of three of her classmates: Naga, who becomes a high-powered journalist, Biplab, an intelligence officer, and Musa, a Kashmiri militant. She becomes involved in the Kashmir struggle with Musa, then marries Naga and eventually rents a flat from Biplab.

It is as if Ms Roy could not decide which book to write, so she wrote them both, and then some. Not satisfied with the horrors of Gujarat and Kashmir, Ms Roy introduces further conflict. Connecting these two disparate threads is a baby, left at one of the anti-corruption rallies in New Delhi that convulsed Indian politics in 2011. The Maoists, who seek the violent overthrow of the state, play a walk-on role, too. Every significant political event or movement in modern Indian history seems to find a place in this sprawling novel.

Ms Roy has spent the two decades since her debut novel, “The God of Small Things”, which won the Booker prize in 1997, espousing all manner of causes. She has argued for independence for Kashmir and against building dams, reported from the Maoist jungles of central India, and written anti-globalisation screeds in which economic growth of any sort must be stopped. “Ministry” is two decades of polemic distilled into one book, with a superstructure of fiction to hold it all together. It does not work.

The best fiction strips away the unnecessary, leaving it to the reader to find meaning between the lines. Ms Roy does the opposite. Even in the occasional sections of brilliance, she feels the need to underline every nugget with a “moral of the story”, hectoring the reader into submission. Nor does it help that the writing itself is often clunky, overwrought or awkward. The elaborate imagery she conjures up seems to be there to show that this is a serious work of fiction, but it does not cohere into a whole. “How to tell a shattered story?” writes Tilottama, towards the end of the novel. “By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.” Alas, “everything” is a recipe for an overlong, unfocused doorstopper, one that would have benefited from a firmer editorial hand.