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The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is Arundhati Roy's first novel since The God of Small Things won the Booker in 1997, and during those two decades she became something other than a novelist: an essayist, an activist, a relentless documenter of the cruelties India inflicts on its margins. The Ministry is the book where those two selves collide, and the collision produces something genuinely extraordinary and genuinely flawed in roughly equal measure.

The novel opens in a graveyard, where a woman named Anjum lives among the dead like a tree, seeing off the crows at dawn and welcoming the bats at dusk. Anjum is a hijra, born a boy, who flees home at fourteen for the Khwabgah, the House of Dreams, a refuge for those who do not fit the rigid binaries the world insists upon. From this opening the book moves outward, gathering stories the way the graveyard gathers the discarded. Anjum eventually builds a guesthouse atop the graves, a sanctuary where misfits, outcasts and the broken raise an abandoned baby together, without the usual requirements of blood or religion. It is a beautiful conceit: a ministry of happiness assembled from everything India would rather forget.

Around this core swirls a second narrative centred on Tilo, an architecture student, and the three men who love her, one of whom crosses into the Kashmiri insurgency. Through these threads Roy carries the reader across the worst pages of recent Indian history: the Gujarat massacre, the endless agony of Kashmir, the displacement of Adivasi communities, the lynchings, the protests at Jantar Mantar. Everything in this book is alive, not only the people but the animals, the buildings, the city itself. Internal desolation rises around a character like a fortress with ramparts and hidden dungeons. At its best, the prose is miraculous, capable of evoking a thousand small acts of tenderness while never softening the brutality it records.

And yet honesty requires admitting what does not work. The book is overstuffed. It carries a vast population of characters, and the reader is often in free fall through time, the structure refusing chronology so thoroughly that stories arrive already finished before they have properly begun. People are introduced pages before they are named. The two main strands, Anjum's and Tilo's, never quite knit into a single fabric, and the seams show. More damagingly, Roy's two decades of non-fiction leave fingerprints everywhere. The novel keeps lurching from soaring poetry into something closer to reportage, the cadence of the human rights summary and the handy explainer working its way into passages that should have been allowed to breathe as fiction. There are stretches that read like an activist's notebook emptied wholesale onto the page, disorganised and unedited, as though everything seen and felt across twenty years had to be included.

The frustration is that the raw material for greatness is unmistakably present. The protagonists exert a magnetic pull; their travails grip. The problem is that Roy too often subordinates them to her political argument, which is more strident, more sustained and more sprawling than anything in her debut. Whether this counts as a flaw or a feature depends partly on what one wants from a novel. There is an argument, and not a weak one, that a country this clamorous cannot be contained by tidy narrative architecture, that the refusal of a single centre is the point rather than a failure of craft. India is not a monoculture, and a book that insists on the multiplicity of its voices is doing something its rightwing critics find genuinely threatening. The accusation of being "anti-India" is itself a kind of testimony to what the book achieves.

So this is not a clean recommendation, and it should not be. Readers who want a propulsive, well-engineered story will lose patience. Readers who share none of Roy's politics will likely find the book insufferable. But for those willing to surrender to its sprawl, to treat it as an elegy for a bulldozed world rather than a conventional novel, there is something here that lingers far longer than its imperfections. It evokes the sense of having lived several lives over, of a single book somehow holding war and death and love and absurd, stubborn joy all at once. Roy remains one of the great memory-keepers of this age, whether or not you accept her version of the ledger. The Ministry is messy, infuriating, occasionally clumsy, and unforgettable. It is the work of a writer who cared too much to make it neat, and the caring shows on every page.