FICTION
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
FLOOD OF FIRE
By Amitav Ghosh
Penguin Hamish Hamilton. $29.99
Trilogies often resemble neapolitan ice-cream, trifectas at the races, or the Three Stooges. One bit lacks the zest and the charm of the other two; one lets the side down; one you never come back to.
This year publishing tests that proposition, with the release of Amitav Ghosh's third volume on the Opium Wars and Hilary Mantel's conclusion of her three-book appraisal of Thomas Cromwell. Ghosh has the high ground. Readers know Cromwell's sorry fate in advance, while the fortunes of Ghosh's kaleidoscope of characters, at sea or on land, apart or united, in India or in China, have remained a mystery.
Flood of Fire takes a while to re-boot. We are reminded of where Ghosh's story reached at the end of River of Smoke, through the rather wooden devices of musings, newspaper clippings and letters. For a little too long, all passion seems spent. A sepoy is humiliated but nobody is killed, a whore strips naked before a customer for the first time, a ship's carpenter undoes a few buttons of a lady's ball-gown, and we have lurched by then through the first 100 pages. The start of the third volume is a world away from the tense, dramatic, complicated and artful blending of catastrophes with which Sea of Poppies climaxed.
Reading the three novels together, though, a more grand and more subtle design becomes evident. Ghosh's trilogy is not merely a "tamasha", an exuberant and extravagant show on a grand scale. The framework supporting and sustaining the three books looks like a Victorian-era, Indo-Chinese version of The Canterbury Tales. Admittedly, Ghosh's cast of characters are not quite pilgrims; even those few who start innocently are certainly worldly by the end. Nor do they really make much progress. Surviving is the trick, as Ghosh buffets his characters with wars, storms, betrayals, false charges, bad luck and the odd flogging. Nonetheless, like Chaucer's pilgrims, Ghosh's cast teach each other, comfort each other, and – most critically – tell each other tales.
As with its two predecessors, Flood of Fire is an exceptionally well-read novel, stuffed with accurate historical detail, rounded off with an extensive list of references, grounded in a deeply compassionate understanding of the ways the English set Indians against Chinese in the Opium Wars. Some readers would argue that Ghosh's research becomes obtrusive, or even ostentatious. That is too harsh. Ghosh immerses his readers in mid-Victorian life as he does with his patois. This book contains a galaxy not merely of conventional borrow-words (like dekko or baboo) but rich, weird exotica such as gomusta, bunnowing, naach-girls, syces and chukker-ballys. Charles Dickens would have loved an extra string to his literary bow as evocative and musical as Ghosh's muddled, befuddling language.
Three books ago, "on an otherwise ordinary day", a woman opium-farmer saw a vision "of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean". By the end of Ghosh's third volume, that ship has gone from transporting slaves, through a lethal storm, on to carrying cargoes of opium. Its history is chequered but also both sordid and sad. So, too, was the English attempt to correct a trade imbalance by expanding exports of opium from India to China, the historical tragedy which is the motor of Ghosh's narrative across all three volumes.
The ship finally goes to war, along with lots of Ghosh's cast, as the English use their cannon to force the cession of Hong Kong and attack Guangzhou. Neither of the staples of sagas appeals to Ghosh. His scenes of violence (even the decisive battle in the Tiger's Mouth) are oddly abbreviated, while interludes of sex are excruciating. A reader might be tempted to skip before one lover awkwardly reaches an "unattainable extremity".
Moving from 1838 to 1841, across his three novels, Ghosh's characters spend much time thinking and talking. Here Ghosh's research always pays off, in describing a soldier ostracised from his regiment (and therefore become"a moving source of defilement"), the treacherous connotations of one Chinese word ("yi"), or the "serenely peaceful nullity" in a first taste of opium. An opium auction is, for Ghosh, "a rancid brew of sweat, beer and ambition", as are the fates his creations endure. They do so dramatically, intensely but, above all, poignantly.
