Turning his eye to the nineteenth-century opium trade, the acclaimedauthor Amitav Ghosh has crafted a novel that is by turns witty andprovocative, while delivering a magnificent historical adventure. Anintricate saga, Sea of Poppies brings together a motley arrayof sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts, who have embarked on atumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean in the midst of the OpiumWars between Britain and China. This panorama of characters, includinga mulatto freedman from America, a bankrupt raja, a beautiful,free-spirited French orphan, a widowed tribeswoman, and other disparatemembers of society, brings to life a period of colonial upheaval thatcaused seismic cultural shifts throughout the globe. The eventstranspiring aboard the Ibis (a former slave ship) provide a richtapestry of a time when the world stood poised to witness some of themost profound destruction-and most sweeping liberation-in the historyof humanity. From the lush poppy fields of the Ganges to the crowdedbackstreets of Canton, across a rolling high sea that beckonsthroughout the narrative, this is a portrait of fateful events you willnot soon forget.
Remember stories? Those rich fictions that we devoured as children andthat gave us a lifelong taste for generous, hearty books? Literaryfashion may dictate that we avoid such indulgences and consume insteaddesiccated novels containing just one gristly ingredient:consciousness. But real readers, however sophisticated, crave realstories now and then. Thankfully, these are still being written, oftenby postcolonial novelists such as Amitav Ghosh, whose Sea of Poppies, is both a writer's triumph and a reader's delight. Better yet, it is the first volume of a proposed trilogy.
Ghosh, a former anthropologist and historian, has written about Asiaand India, Britain and America, the past and the present, always with acharacteristic blend of subtlety and gusto. In The Glass Palace, for example, he memorably described the teak-logging industry of 19th-and early-20th-century Burma, charted the course of an epic love story,and dramatized the British invasion of 1885 as well as the country'ssubsequent history.
