River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh review
The second part of Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy mixes historical insight with terrific storytelling
Amitav Ghosh conjures plotlines out of trading routes, which, in his supple and compulsive imagination, come magically alive as the conduits for human history; they effect the exchange not just of silk and silver but of language and love and enmity. Perhaps the only element lacking from this second book in the "Ibis trilogy" which, when complete, will be a peerless account of the mixing of peoples in the lands that border the Indian Ocean during the years of the opium wars, is a map on which you might trace the various ill-fated voyages and personal quests and commercial ventures that form the cat's cradle of the novel's structure.
It begins as all seafaring tales should, with a raging storm. Three very different vessels have been caught up in it: the Ibis, a slave ship of convicts and labourers en route from Calcutta to Mauritius; the Anahita, carrying the biggest ever shipment of raw opium west to Canton; and the Redruth, a Cornish brig with a crew of plant-hunters and cargo of rare flora. The stories of these three ships run first in parallel before intertwining in unexpected and intriguing ways. The first part of this trilogy, the Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies, mostly followed the opium trade down the Ganges to Calcutta; here Ghosh shifts most of his focus to Canton, the floating and ephemeral city in which the covert opium market fuelled British colonialism and brought China reluctantly into the emerging politics of theworld.
We see Canton's network of alleys and harbours and islands through many eyes, but it is first brought to life by Bahram Modi, a Parsi opium merchant out of Bombay, who is using the destructive and illegal trade to both emphasise his independence from his wife's overbearing family and to pursue his passion for a young woman who lives on a sampan in the floating city. Canton's Fanqui-town, where Bahram establishes a waterfront house, is t! he home of adventure and possibility, the place where men go to reimagine themselves. Ghosh has a gift for both establishing this long-forgotten excitement and for exposing its implications. At their best his tales marry the storytelling brio of something like the Hornblower books with an acutely nuanced sense of historical detail and cross-cultural insight.
This latter quality is embedded in the perfectly pitched use of dialect and language. One of the many byproducts of the opium trade was the spread of English across the subcontinent and beyond. Ghosh allows you to witness the birth of local variants of language, in the sudden desperation to communicate of lovers and traders (the word "pidgin" itself, we are reminded, comes from a Cantonese mishearing of "business"). These literal Chinese whispers furnish the novel with its richness and invention, and much of its comedy. The plant-hunter Fitcher Penrose, on a typical journey both for wealth and knowledge, brings his Cornish vowels into the mix as a way of describing the world but they compete for attention with the miscegenated cadences of all Ghosh's other inventions. Sometimes Bahram Modi, or his estranged son Ah Fatt, seem lost for words, but circumstances force them into articulation.
This twisting of tongues energises all of Ghosh's writing. It allows him to engage with quiet irony in the official rhetoric of the British Chamber of Commerce in Canton and to pass it off as one style among many. The book in this way engages with the broader sweep of history, in particular the complex chain of events that led to the first Anglo-Chinese opium war of 1838, without ever allowing you to forget the ways in which these headline facts had myriad and tragic consequences for millions of individual human lives. What begins, for the likes of Bahram Modi, in possibility and freedom, ends in chaos and embargo, with the trade stalled by the Chinese emperor's determination to rid his country of an opium plague and British desperation to defend the financial e! ngine of colonialism. On one level, the novel that arises from this formative geopolitics is a remarkable feat of research, bringing alive the hybrid customs of food and dress and the competing philosophies of the period with intimate precision; on another it is a subversive act of empathy, viewing a whole panorama of world history from the "wrong" end of the telescope. The real trick, though, is that it is also fabulously entertaining.
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