Elation, followed by panic: that about sums up my reaction when I was asked to interview Amitav Ghosh about his latest novel, River of Smoke. Unfortunately I’m easily intimidated by nearly every author I encounter, but Ghosh? He’s brilliant, complex, prolific, a veritable trifecta of admirable literary qualities, and so transcends being merely a smarty-pants author. His best-selling 2008 Sea of Poppies was so multifaceted and imaginative it was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, the first of three promised tomes in Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. Reading that book was to be catapulted headfirst into, among other topics, the early 19th-century opium industry, seafaring, the start of the Indian Diaspora, botany, and the politics of British colonialism, with an attendant vocabulary quirky enough it required a lengthy glossary. (What to make, for instance, of “Damned luckerbaugs and wanderoos! . . . where’s my dumbpoke and pollock-saug . . .”?) Ghosh’s characters – among them an impoverished maharaja, a French orphan, a widowed Indian farmer, an American slave’s son – were palpably believable, as were the unorthodox situations that united them all. I found it difficult to break away from the 1830’s and return to the 21st century, so caught up did I become each time I read a few pages. I bitterly lamented the book’s end, and installment #2, River of Smoke, was eagerly anticipated.
Now here I am, Ghosh fangirl, about to interview the author. Yikes.
Amitav Ghosh
A cursory Google search yields over 1.5 million results for Amitav Ghosh: reviews, interviews, and essays devoted to him, plus radio, TV, and internet appearances, not to mention the novels, collections, and non-fiction works he’s produced. And by October 23rd, I’ll have examined every single one of them.
OK, that’s a lie. But my preparation (goaded by neurotic anxiety and old-fashioned curiosity) means gorging on as much of this seemingly-endless datastream as possible. Luckily, he is as fascinating as his writing, having been raised in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, with chunks of time spent in Egypt, Burma, and many other locales. In fact, Ghosh’s life seems to reflect a restless quest for profound understanding of people and places, and the research for his novels parallels that intensity. Ships’ logs, judicial records, travel journals, ancient broadsides, Parliamentary papers, treatises, diaries, letters – there seems to be no end to the arcane material Ghosh excavates, and he’s stated many times that he revels in this aspect of his work.
But it’s his obsessive attention to detail, whether in sights, sounds, and smells, or to the social structures, racist viewpoints, and intricate politics of the day that also make these books so satisfying. River of Smoke, which picks up in the 1830’s where S.O.P. left off, focuses on the old Chinese port of Canton (now Guangzhou) as its atmospheric stage, with dynamic new characters supplementing earlier ones. I was so taken by the descriptions of the city’s multi-national “hongs”, or business centers, that I searched out early drawings of this foreign quarter.
In Poppies, Ghosh detailed the devastating effects of England’s forced opium production on Indian farmers. Now we see the next stage, as the drug arrives and is traded in China, despite that country’s increasingly forceful and ultimately failed attempts to stop the illicit trafficking that addicted its population. But considering that the lucrative opium trade provided 20% of the British Empire’s entire revenue at the time, the idea of walking away was out of the question. Here’s one fact that illuminates the situation: in 1820, there were 9,708 fifty-pound chests of opium imported to China. Just fifteen years later in 1835, around the time River of Smoke is set, that number had multiplied to 35, 445 chests!
Ghosh, in his two volumes, has rocketed readers to the brink of the Opium Wars that violently altered China’s history, and will surely (I hope…) be the central narrative of his third novel. I found this period in history in that part of the world to be particularly compelling, so ignorant was I – along with most of us in the USA or, for that matter, India and England – about this shameful moment, not to mention the role Americans played in the opium trade and subsequent conflict. We were far from guilt-free, unfortunately.
Ghosh deftly interweaves his fictional and historical figures – Napoleon even makes an appearance at one point – nudging the story to a calamitous conclusion, while his characters and readers alike are forced to constantly adjust their moral compasses. By the end, we might not agree with the choices made by our favorite denizens of his story, but we have a much better understanding of how they made those decisions.
Since it will, sadly, be years before Ghosh gets his next installment to the printer (he says he’s in no hurry, and could keep writing this series for the rest of his life), we can at least content ourselves with his eclectic backlist. Ghosh’s first foray into epic historical fiction, The Glass Palace (2000), tackles a century of Indo-Burmese relations and is an incomparable book in its own right, targeting plenty of the issues that crop up in the Ibis books: race, identity, class, Colonialism, and what ultimately constitutes “home.” Or if it’s futuristic/sci-fi you’re after, pick up The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), a complex sort of mystical-medical-thriller that won the Arthur C. Clarke award. Or ramble through his collections of essays. Or the non-fiction travel/anthropology discourse, In an Antique Land (1992), centered in Egypt while he was still pursuing social anthropology. Whatever direction you choose, Amitav Ghosh has his bases covered, and disappointment is not an option.
Now, back to the research . . .
Mandel Hall, University of Chicago: Oct. 23, 4:00 PM
Tags: Ghosh, Lautman, India, China, colonialism, opium, fiction, opus, prize, literature, novel, essay
