There is no recipe for good writing, it hardly needs to be said, and this is as true for writing about atrocity as about any other kind. That is why it is so odd that literary accounts of atrocity so often resort to prolepsis, as in the “years later” that Arundhati Roy makes use of in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Here prolepsis does, again, what seems to be its thing. It empties out the present, rejecting as inadequate the subjective judgments of the characters immediately embroiled in the event. If you want to say no to the horror that lies before you — as you must, reading about an atrocity — you have to think in the long, long term. [...]